
Class V. . 

Book 

GsyiightN" 



corvRiGtrr deposit. 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

AND 

THE LIFE OF TO-DAY 



BY THE SAME AUTHOR 

MYSTICISM 
THE MYSTIC WAY 
IMMANENCE 
THEOPHANIES 
PRACTICAL MYSTICISM 
JACOPONE DA TODI 
THE ESSENTIALS OF MYSTICISM 

E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

AND 

THE LIFE OF TO-DAY 



BY 

EVELYN yNDERHILL 

Author of "Mysticism,'' **The Essentials of Mysticism,** etc. 




NEW YORK 

E. P. BUTTON & COMPANY 

681 Fifth Avenue 



Copyrinrht. 1922, 
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 

All rights reserved 



^<< 



PRINTED IN THK UNITKD STATES OF AMERICA 



VArt -f*' ipli CT'PAMY 
L>:No»<KKit. >^ Af.o ^^w TURK 



OCT 30 '22 

©CI.ACbti539 



9r) 



IN MEMORIAM 

E. R. B. 



PREFACE 

This book owes Its origin to the fact that in the 
autumn of 192 1 the authorities of Manchester Col- 
lege, Oxford invited me to deliver the inaugural 
course of a lectureship in religion newly established 
under the will of the late Professor Upton. No 
conditions being attached to this appointment, it 
seemed a suitable opportunity to discuss, so far as 
possible in the language of the moment, some of the 
implicits which I believe to underlie human effort 
and achievement In the domain of the spiritual life. 
The material gathered for this purpose has now been 
added to, revised, and to some extent re-written, in 
order to make it appropriate to the purposes of the 
reader rather than the hearer. As the object of the 
book is strictly practical, a special attempt has been 
made to bring the classic experiences of the spiritual 
life into line with the conclusions of modern psychol- 
ogy, and in particular, to suggest some of the direc- 
tions In which recent psychological research may 
cast light on the standard problems of the religious 
consciousness. This subject Is still In its Infancy; 
but It is destined, I am sure, in the near future to 
exercise a transforming Influence on the study of 
spiritual experience, and may even prove to be the 
starting point of a new apologetic. Those who are 



viii PREFACE 

inclined either to fear or to resent the application to 
this experience of those laws which — as we are now 
gradually discovering — govern the rest of our 
psychic life, or who are offended by the resulting 
demonstrations of continuity between our most 
homely and most lofty reactions to the universe, 
might take to themselves the plain words of Thomas 
a Kempis: "Thou art a man and not God, thou 
art flesh and no angel." 

Since my subject is not the splendour of historic 
sanctity but the normal life of the Spirit, as it may 
be and is lived In the here-and-now, I have done 
my best to describe the character and meaning of 
this life in the ordinary terms of present day thought, 
and with little or no use of the technical language 
of mysticism. For the same reason, no attention 
has been given to those abnormal experiences and 
states of consciousness, which, too often regarded 
ns specially "mystical," arc now recognized by all 
competent students as representing the unfortunate 
accidents rather than the abiding substance of spirlt- 
i-ality. Readers of these pages will find nothing 
about trances, ecstacles and other rare psychic 
phenomena; which sometimes indicate holiness, and 
sometimes only disease. For information on these 
matters they must go to larger and more technical 
works. Mv aim here is the more general one, of 
indicating first the characteristic experiences — dis- 
coverable within all great religions — which justify 
or are fundamental to the spiritual life, and the way 
in which these experiences may be accommodated 



PREFACE ix 

to the world-view of the modern man : and next, the 
nature of that spiritual life as it appears in human 
history. The succeeding sections of the book treat 
in some detail the light cast on spiritual problems 
by mental analysis — a process which need not neces- 
sarily be conducted from the standpoint of a de- 
graded materialism — and by recent work on the 
psychology of autistic thought and of suggestion. 
These Investigations have a practical interest for 
every man who desires to be the "captain of his 
soul.'* The relation in which institutional religion 
does or should stand to the spiritual life Is also In 
part a matter for psychology; which Is here called 
upon to deal with the religious aspect of the social 
instincts, and the problems surrounding symbols and 
cultus. These chapters lead up to a discussion of 
the personal aspect of the spiritual life. Its curve of 
growth, characters and activities; and a further sec- 
tion suggests some ways In which educationists might 
promote the upsprlnging of this life In the young. 
Finally, the last chapter attempts to place the fact 
of the life of the Spirit In Its relation to the social 
order, and to indicate some of the results which 
might follow upon its healthy corporate develop- 
ment. It Is superfluous to point out that each of 
these subjects needs, at least, a volume to Itself: 
and to some of them I shall hope to return In the 
future. Their treatment in the present work Is 
necessarily fragmentary and suggestive; and Is in- 
tended rather to stimulate thought, than to offer 
solutions. 



X PREFACE 

Part of Chapter IV has already appeared In "The 
Fortnightly Review" under the title "Suggestion 
and Religious Experience." Chapter VIII incor- 
porates several passages from an article on "Sources 
of Power in Human Life" originally contributed to 
the "Hibbert Journal." These are reprinted by 
kind permission of the editors concerned. My 
numerous debts to previous writers are obvious, and 
for the most part are acknowledged in the foot- 
notes; the greatest, to the works of Baron von 
Hiigel, will be clear to all students of his writings. 
Thanks are also due to my old friend William Scott 
Palmer, who read part of the manuscript and gave 
me much generous and valuable advice. It Is a 
pleasure to express in this place my warm gratitude 
first to the Principal and authorities of Manchester 
College, who gave me the opportunity of delivering 
these chapters in their original form, and whose un- 
failing sympathy and kindness so greatly helped 
me: and secondly, to the members of the Oxford 
Faculty of Theology, to whom I owe the great hon- 
our of being the first woman lecturer In religion to 
appear in the University list. 

E. U. 

Epiphany, 1922. 



CONTENTS 



OHAPTEB PAGB 

Preface , vii 

I. The Characters of Spiritual Life i 

II. History and the Life of the Spirit 38 

in. Psychology and the life of the Spirit: (I) the 

Analysis of Mind 74 

IV. Psychology and the Life of the Spirit: (II) Con- 
templation and Suggestion 112 

V. Institutional Religion and the Life of the Spirit . 153 

VI. The Life of the Spirit in the Individual . . . .191 

VII. The Life of the Spirit and Education 228 

VIII. The Life of the Spirit and the Social Order . . 266 

Principal Works Used and Cited 300 

Index 307 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

AND 

THE LIFE OF TO-DAY 



Initio tu, Doraine, terram fundasti; et opera manuum tuarum 
sunt caeli 

Ipsi peribunt, tu autem perinanes ; et omnes sicut vcstimentum 
vcterascent. 

Et sicut opertorium mutabis eos, et mutabuntur; 

Tu autem idem ipse es, et anni tui non deficient. 

Filii servorum tuorum habitabunt; et semen eorum in seculum 
dirigetur. 

— Psalm cii: 25-28 



The Life of the Spirit 

and 

The Life of Today 

CHAPTER I 

THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 

This book has been called "The Life of the Spirit 
and the Life of To-day" in order to emphasize 
as much as possible the practical, here-and-now na- 
ture of its subject; and specially to combat the idea 
that the spiritual life — or the mystic life, as its more 
intense manifestations are sometimes called — is to 
be regarded as primarily a matter of history. It 
is not. It is a matter of biology. Though we can- 
not disregard history in our study of it, that history 
will only be valuable to us in so far as we keep tight 
hold on its direct connection with the present. Its 
immediate bearing on our own lives: and this we 
shall do only in so far as we realize the unity of all 
the higher experiences of the race. In fact, were 
I called upon to choose a motto which should 
express the central notion of these chapters, that 
motto would be — "There are diversities of gifts, 
but the same Spirit." This declaration I would in- 

I 



2 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

terpret in the widest possible sense; as suggesting 
the underlying harmony and single inspiration of all 
man^s various and apparently conflicting expres- 
sions of his instinct for fullness of life. For we 
shall not be able to make order, in any hopeful sense, 
of the tangle of material which is before us, until 
we have subdued it to this ruling thought: seen one 
transcendent Object towards which all our twisting 
pathways run, and one impulsion pressing us towards 
it. 

As psychology is now teaching us to find, at all 
levels of our craving, dreaming, or thinking, the 
diverse expressions of one psychic energy; so that 
type of philosophy which comes nearest to the re- 
ligion of the Spirit, invites us to find at all levels of 
life the workings and strivings of one Power: *'a 
Reality which both underlies and crowns all our 
other, lesser strivings." ^ Variously manifested in 
partial achievements of order and goodness, in di- 
versities of beauty, and in our graded apprehensions 
of truth, this Spirit is yet most fully known to us in 
the transcendent values of holiness and love. The 
more deeply it is loved by man, the nearer he draws 
to its heart: and the greater his love, the more 
fully does he experience its transforming and ener- 
gizing power. The words of Plotinus are still true 
for every one of us, and are unaffected by the pres- 
ence or absence of creed: 

1 Von Hugel: "Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Relig- 
ion," p. 60. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 3 

*'Yonder Is the true object of our love, which it 
Is possible to grasp and to live with and truly to pos- 
sess, since no envelope of flesh separates us from 
it. He who has seen It knows what I say, that the 
soul then has another life, when it comes to God, 
and having come possesses Him, and knows when in 
that state that it is in the presence of the dispenser 
of true life and that it needs nothing further." ^ 

So, if we would achieve anything like a real in- 
tegration of life — and until we have done so, we are 
bound to be restless and uncertain in our touch upon 
experience — we are compelled to press back towards 
contact with this living Reality, however conceived 
by us. And this not by way of a retreat from our 
actual physical and mental life, but by way of a 
fulfilment of it. 

More perhaps than ever before, men are now 
driven to ask themselves the searching question of 
the disciple In Boehme's Dialogue on the Supersen- 
sual Life: "Seeing I am In nature, how may I come 
through nature into the supersensual ground, with- 
out destroying nature?" ^ And such a coming 
through into the ground, such a finding and feeling 
of Eternal Life, is I take It the central business of 
religion. For religion is committed to achieving a 
synthesis of the eternal and the ever-fleeting, of 
nature and of spirit; lifting up the whole of life to 
a greater reality, because a greater participation in 

^ Ennead I, 6. 7. 

2 Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV. 



4 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

eternity. Such a participation in eternity, mani- 
fested in the time-world, is the very essence of the 
spiritual life: but, set as we are in mutability, our 
apprehensions of it can only be partial and relative. 
Absolutes are known only to absolute mind; our 
measurements, however careful and intricate, can 
never tally with the measurements of God. As 
Einstein conceives of space curved round the sun we, 
borrowing his symbolism for a moment, may per- 
haps think of the world of Spirit as curved round 
the human soul; shaped to our finite understanding, 
and therefore presenting to us innumerable angles 
of approach. This means that God can and must 
be sought only within and through our human ex- 
perience. "Where," says Jacob Boehme, "will you 
seek for God? Seek Him in your soul, which has 
proceeded out of the Eternal Nature, the living 
fountain of forces wherein the Divine working 
stands." ^ 

But, on the other hand, such limitation as this 
is no argument for agnosticism. For this our hu- 
man experience in its humbling imperfection, how- 
ever we interpret it, is as real within its own system 
of reference as anything else. It is our inevitably 
limited way of laying hold on the stuff of existence: 
and not less real for that than the monkeys' way 
on one hand, or the angels' way on the other. 
Only we must be sure that we do it as thoroughly and 
completely as we can; disdaining the indolence 

1 Op. cit., loc. cit. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 5 

which so easily relapses to the lower level and the 
smaller world. 

And the first point I wish to make is, that the ex- 
perience which we call the life of the Spirit is such a 
genuine fact; which meets us at all times and places, 
and at all levels of life. It is an experience which is 
independent of, and often precedes, any explanation 
or rationalization we may choose to make of it: and 
no one, as a matter of fact, takes any real interest in 
the explanation, unless he has had some form of the 
experience. We notice, too, that it is most ordi- 
narily and also most Impressively given to us as such 
an objective experience, whole and unanalyzed; and 
that when it is thus given, and perceived as effecting 
a transfiguration of human character, we on our part 
most readily understand and respond to It. 

Thus Plotinus, than whom few persons have lived 
more capable of analysis, can only say: *'The soul 
knows when in that state that it Is in the presence 
of the dispenser of true life." Yet in saying this, 
does he not tell us far more, and rouse in us a 
greater and more fruitful longing, than in all his 
disquisitions about the worlds of Spirit and of Soul? 
And Kabir, from another continent and time, saying 
"More than all else do I cherish at heart the love 
which makes me to live a limitless life in this 
world, '^ ^ assures us in these words that he too has 
known that more abundant life. These are the 
statements of the pure religious experience. In so far 

1 "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 31. 



6 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

as "pure" experience is possible to us; which is only 
of course in a limited and relative sense. The sub- 
jective element, all that the psychologist means by 
apperception, must enter in, and control It. Never- 
theless, they refer to man's communion with an inde- 
pendent objective Reality. This experience is more 
real and concrete, therefore more important, than 
any of the systems by which theology seeks to explain 
it. We may then take it, without prejudice to any 
special belief, that the spiritual life we wish to study 
is otie life; based on experience of one Reality, and 
manifested in the diversity of gifts and graces which 
men have been willing to call true, holy, beautiful and 
good. For the moment at least we may accept the 
definition of it given by Dr. Bosanquet, as "oneness 
with the Supreme Good in every facet of the heart 
and will." ^ And since without derogation of its 
transcendent character, its vigour, wonder and 
worth, it is in human experience rather than in spec- 
ulation that we are bound to seek it, we shall look 
first at the forms taken by man's intuition of Eter- 
nity, the life to which it seems to call him; and next 
at the actual appearance of this life in history. 
Then at the psychological machinery by which we 
may lay hold of it, the contributions which religious 
institutions make to its realization; and last, turning 
our backs on these partial explorations of the living 
Whole, seek if we can to seize something of its 
inwardness as it appears to the individual, the way 
1 Bernard Bosanquet: "What Religion Is," p. 32. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 7 

in which education may best prepare its fulfilment, 
and the part it must play in the social group. 

We begin therefore at the starting point of this 
life of Spirit: in man's vague, fluctuating, yet per- 
sistent apprehension of an enduring and transcen- 
dent reality — his instinct for God. The character- 
istic forms taken by this instinct are simple and fairly 
well known. Complication only comes in with the 
interpretation we put on them. 

By three main ways we tend to realize our limited 
personal relations with that transcendent Other 
which we call divine, eternal or real; and these, ap- 
pearing perpetually in the vast literature of religion, 
might be illustrated from all places and all times. 

First, there is the profound sense of security: of 
being safely held in a cosmos of which, despite all 
contrary appearance, peace is the very heart, and 
which is not inimical to our true interests. For those 
whose religious experience takes this form, God is 
the Ground of the soul, the Unmoved, our Very 
Rest; statements which meet us again and again in 
spiritual literature. This certitude of a principle 
of permanence within and beyond our world of 
change — the sense of Eternal Life — lies at the very 
centre of the religious consciousness; which will 
never on this point capitulate to the attacks of 
philosophy on the one hand (such as those of the 
New Realists) or of psychology on the other hand, 
assuring him that what he mistakes for the Eternal 
World is really his own unconscious mind. Here 



8 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

man, at least In his great representatives — the per- 
sons of transcendent religious genius — seems to get 
beyond all labels. He finds and feels a truth that 
cannot fail him, and that satisfies both his heart and 
mind: a justification of that transcendental feeling 
which is the soul alike of philosophy and of art. 
If his life has Its roots here, it will be a fruitful 
tree; and whatever its outward activities, it will 
be a spiritual life, since it Is lived, as George Fox was 
so fond of saying, in the Universal Spirit. All 
know the great passage in St. Augustine's Confes- 
sions in which he describes how "the mysterious eye 
of his soul gazed on the Light that never changes; 
above the eye of the soul, and above intelligence." ^ 
There Is nothing archaic in such an experience. 
Though Its description may depend on the language 
of Neoplatonism, It is In its essence as possible and 
as fruitful for us to-day as It was in the fourth cen- 
tury, and the doctrine and discipline of Christian 
prayer have always admitted its validity. 

Here and in many other examples which might be 
quoted, the unique spiritual fact is interpreted in a 
non-personal and cosmic way; and we must remem- 
ber that what is described to us is always, inevitably, 
the more or less emotional Interpretation, never the 
pure immediacy of experience. This interpretation 
frequently makes use of the symbolisms of space, 
stillness, and light: the contemplative soul is "lost 

1 Aug. ; Conf. VII, 17. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 9 

In the ocean of the Godhead/' ^'enters His silence'' 
or exclaims with Dante : 

"la mia vista, venendo sincera, 
e piu e piu entrava per lo raggio 
deir alta luce, che da se e vera." ^ 

But In the second characteristic form of the reli- 
gious experience, the relationship is felt rather as the 
intimate and reciprocal communion of a person with 
a Person; a form of apprehension which is common 
to the great majority of devout natures. It is true 
that Divine Reality, while doubtless including in 
its span all the values we associate with personality, 
must far overpass it: and this conclusion has been 
reached again and again by profoundly religious 
minds, of whom among Christians we need only 
mention Dionysius the Areopagite, Eckhart, and 
Ruysbroeck. Yet these very minds have always in 
the end discovered the necessity of finding place for 
the overwhelming certitude of a personal contact, a 
prevenient and an answering love. For it is always 
in a personal and emotional relationship that man 
finds himself impelled to surrender to God; and 
this surrender is felt by him to evoke a response. 
It is significant that even modern liberalism Is forced, 
in the teeth of rationality, to acknowledge this 
fact of the religious experience. Thus we have on 

1 "My vision, becoming more purified, entered deeper and deeper 
into the ray of that Supernal Light, which in itself is true" — Par. 
XXXIII, 52. 



10 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

the one hand the Catholic-minded but certainly un- 
orthodox Spanish thinker, Miguel de Unamuno, con- 
fessing — 

"I believe in God as I believe in my friends, be- 
cause I feel the breath of His affection, feel His in- 
visible and intangible hand, drawing me, leading 
me, grasping me. . . . Once and again in my life 
I have seen myself suspended in a trance over the 
abyss; once and again I have found myself at the 
cross-roads, confronted by a choice of ways and 
aware that in choosing one I should be renouncing 
all the others — for there is no turning back upon 
these roads of life; and once and again in such 
unique moments as these I have felt the impulse 
of a mighty power, conscious, sovereign and loving. 
And then, before the feet of the wayfarer, opens 
out the way of the Lord." ^ 

Compare with this Upton the Unitarian: 
*'If," he says, "this Absolute Presence, which 
meets us face to face in the most momentous of 
our life's experiences, which pours into our faint- 
ing wills the elixir of new life and strength, and 
into our woun*ded hearts the balm of a quite in- 
finite sympathy, cannot fitly be called a personal 
presence, it is only because this word personal is too 
poor and carries with it associations too human and 
too limited adequately to express this profound 
God-consciousness." ^ 

1 "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men and Peoples," p. 194. 

2 T. Upton: "The Bases of Religious Belief," p. 363. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 11 

Such a personal God-consciousness is the one im- 
pelling cause of those moral struggles, sacrifices and 
purifications, those costing and heroic activities, 
to which all greatly spiritual souls find them- 
selves drawn. We note that these souls experience 
it even when it conflicts with their philosophy: for a 
real religious intuition is always accepted by the 
self that has it as taking priority of thought, and 
carrying with it so to speak its own guarantees. 
Thus Blake, for whom the Holy Ghost was an "in- 
tellectual fountain,'^ hears the Divine Voice crying: 

"I am not a God afar off, I am a brother and friend ; 
Within your bosoms I reside, and you reside in me." ^ 

Thus in the last resort the Sufi poet can only say: 

"O soul, seek the Beloved; O friend, seek the Friend!"^ 

Thus even Plotinus is driven to speak of his Di- 
vine Wisdom as the Father and ever-present Com- 
panion of the soul,^ and Kabir, for whom God is the 
Unconditioned and the Formless, can yet exclaim: 

"From the beginning until the end of time there 
is love between me and thee: and how shall such 
love be extinguished?" ^ 

Christianity, through Its concepts of the Divine 
Fatherhood and of the Eternal Christ, has given to 
this sense of personal communion its fullest and 
most beautiful expression: 

1 Blake: "Jerusalem," Cap. i. 

2 Nicholson: "The Divani Shamsi Tabriz," p. 141. 
^ Ennead V. 1. 3. 

^ Kabir, op. cit., p. 41. 



12 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

"Amore, chl t'ama non sta ozioso, 

tanto li par dolce de te gustare, 

ma tutta ora vive desideroso 

como te possa stretto piu amare; 

che tanto sta per te lo cor gioioso, 
chi nol sentisse, nol porria parlare 
quanto e dolce a gustare lo tuo sapore." ^ 

On the immense question of what it is that lies 
behind this sense of direct intercourse, this passion- 
ate friendship with the Invisible, I cannot enter. 
But it has been one of the strongest and most 
fruitful influences in religious history, and gives 
in particular its special colour to the most perfect 
developments of Christian mysticism. 

Last — and here is the aspect of religious experi- 
ence which is specially to concern us — Spirit is felt 
as an inflowing power, a veritable accession of 
vitality; energizing the self, or the religious group, 
impelling it to the fullest and most zealous living- 
out of its existence, giving it fresh joy and vigour, 
and lifting it to fresh levels of life. This sense 
of enhanced life is a mark of all religions of the 
Spirit. "He giveth power to the faint," says the 
Second Isaiah, "and to them that hath no might he 
increaseth strength . . . they that wait upon the 
Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount 
up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be 

^ "Love, whoso loves thee cannot idle be, so sweet it seems to 
hira to taste thee; but every hour he lives in longing, that he may 
love thee more straitly. For in thee the heart so joyful dwells, that 
he who feels it not can never say how sweet it is to taste thy 
savour" — Jacopone da Todi: Lauda loi. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 13 

weary; and they shall walk, and not faint." ^ ' "I 
live — yet not I/' *'I can do all things,'' says SI:. 
Paul, seeking to express his dependence on this 
Divine strength invading and controlling him: and 
assures his neophytes that they too have received 
*^the Spirit of power." ''My life," says St. Au- 
gustine, ''shall be a real life, being wholly full of 
Thee." ^ "Having found God," says a modern 
Indian saint, "the current of my life flowed on 
swiftly, I gained fresh strength." ^ All other men 
and women of the Spirit speak in the same sense, 
when they try to describe the source of their ac- 
tivity and endurance. 

So, the rich experiences of the religious conscious- 
ness seem to be resumed in these three outstanding 
types of spiritual awareness. The cosmic, ontolog- 
ical, or transcendent; finding God as the infinite 
Reality outside and beyond us. The personal, find- 
ing Him as the living and responsive object of our 
love, in immediate touch with us. The dynamic, 
finding Him as the power that dwells within or 
energizes us. These are not exclusive but comple- 
mentary apprehensions, giving objectives to Intellect 
feeling and will. They must all be taken Into ac- 
count in any attempt to estimate the full character 
of the spiritual life, and this life can hardly achieve 
perfection unless all three be present in some meas- 

1 Isaiah xl, 29-'3i. 

2 Aug.: Conf. X, 28. 

8 "Autobiography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," 
Cap. 12. 



14 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

ure. Thus the French contemplative Lucie-Chris- 
tlne says, that when the voice of God called her it 
was at one and the same time a Light, a Drawing, 
and a Power, ^ and her Indian contemporary the 
Maharishi Devendranath Tagore, that "Seekers 
after God must realize Brahma in these three 
places. They must see Him within, see Him with- 
out, and see Him in that abode of Brahma where 
He exists in Himself." - And it seems to me, that 
what we have in the Christian doctrine of the 
Trinity, is above all the crystallization and mind's 
interpretation of these three ways in which our 
simple contact with God is actualized by us. It is, 
like so many other dogmas when we get to the bot- 
tom of them, an attempt to describe experience. 
What is that supernal symphony of which this elu- 
sive music, with its three complementary strains, 
forms part? We cannot know this, since we are de- 
barred by our situation from knowledge of wholes. 
But even those strains which we do hear, assure us 
how far we are yet from conceiving the possibilities 
of life, of power, of beauty which are contained 
in them. 

And if the first type of experience, with the im- 
mense feeling of assurance, of peace, and of quietude 
which comes from our intuitive contact with that 
world which Ruysbroeck called the "world that is 
unwalled," ^ and from the mind's utter surrender 

1 "Le Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine," p. ii. 

- "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap. 20. 

3 Ruysbroeck : "The Book of the XII Beguines," Cap. 8. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 15 

and abolition of resistances — if ail this seems to 
lead to a merely static or contemplative conception 
of the spiritual life; the third type of experience, 
with Its Impulse towards action, Its often strongly 
felt accession of vitality and power, leads Inevitably 
to a complementary and dynamic Interpretation of 
that life. Indeed, If the first moment in the life 
of the Spirit be man's apprehension of Eternal 
Life, the second moment — without which the first 
has little worth for him — consists of his response 
to that transcendent Reality. Perception of it lays 
on him the obligation of living in Its atmosphere, 
fulfilling its meaning, if he can: and this will In- 
volve for him a measure of Inward transformation, 
a difiicult growth and change. Thus the Ideas of 
new birth and regeneration have always been, and 
I think must ever be, closely associated with man's 
discovery of God: and the soul's true path seems 
to be from intuition, through adoration, to moral 
effort, and thence to charity. 

Even so did the Oxford Methodists, who began 
by trying only to worship God and he good by ad- 
hering to a strict devotional rule, soon find them- 
selves impelled to try to do good by active social 
work.^ And at his highest development, and in so 
far as he has appropriated the full richness of ex,- 
perience which is offered to him, man will and 
should find himself, as It were, flung to and fro be- 
tween action and contemplation. Between the call 

^ See Overton : "Life of Wfisley." Cap. 2. 



16 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

to transcendence, to a simple self-loss In the unfath- 
omable and adorable life of God, and the call to a 
full, rich and various actualization of personal life, 
in the energetic strivings of a fellow worker with 
Him: between the soul's profound sense of trans- 
cendent love, and its felt possession of and duty 
towards immanent love — a parodox which only 
some form of incarnational philosophy can solve. 
It is said of Abu Said, the great Sufi, at the full term 
of his development, that he "did all normal things 
while ever thinking of God." ^ Here, I believe, 
we find the norm of the spiritual life, in such a com- 
plete response both to the temporal and to the 
eternal revelations and demands of the Divine na- 
ture : on the one hand, the highest and most costing 
calls made on us by that world of succession in which 
we find ourselves; on the other, an unmoved abiding 
in the bosom of eternity, "where was never heard 
quarter-clock to strike, never seen minute glasse to 
turne." ^ 

There have been many schools and periods in 
which one half of this dual life of man has been un- 
duly emphasized to the detriment of the other. 
Often in the East — and often too in the first, pre- 
Benedictine phase of Christian monasticism — there 
has been an unbalanced cultivation of the contem- 
plative life, resulting in a narrow, abnormal, imper- 
fectly vitalized and a-social type of spirituality. On 

iR. A. Nicholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. i. 
2 "Donne's Sermons," edited by L. Pearsall Smith, p. 236. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 17 

the other hand, In our own day the tendency to ac- 
tion usually obliterates the contemplative side of ex- 
perience altogether: and the result is the feverish- 
ness, exhaustion and uncertainty of aim characteris- 
tic of the over-driven and the underfed. But no 
one can be said to live in its fulness the life of the 
Spirit who does not observe a due balance between 
the two : both receiving and giving, both apprehend- 
ing and expressing, and thus achieving that state of 
which Ruysbroeck said ^'Then only is our life a 
whole, when work and contemplation dwell in us 
side by side, and we are perfectly in both of them 
at once." ^ All Christian writers on the life of the 
Spirit point to the perfect achievement of this two- 
fold ideal in Christ; the pattern of that completed 
humanity towards which the indwelling Spirit is 
pressing the race. His deeds of power and mercy. 
His richly various responses to every level of human 
existence, His gift to others of new faith and life, 
were directly dependent on the nights spent on the 
mountain In prayer. When St. Paul entreats us to 
grow up Into the fulness of His stature, this Is the 
ideal that is Implied. 

In the Intermediate term of the religious experi- 
ence, that felt communion with a Person which is the 
clou of the devotional life, we get as It were the link 
between the extreme apprehensions of transcendence 
and of immanence, and their expression in the lives 
of contemplation and of action; and also a focus 

1 Ruysbroeck, "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 14. 



18 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

for that religious emotion which is the most power- 
ful stimulus to spiritual growth. It is needless to 
emphasize the splendid use which Christianity has 
made of this type of experience; nor unfortunately, 
the exaggerations to which It has led. Both ex- 
tremes are richly represented in the literature of 
mysticism. But we should remember that Christi- 
anity is not alone In thus requiring place to be made 
for such a conception of God as shall give body to 
all the most precious and fruitful experiences of the 
heart, providing simple human sense and human 
feeling with something on which to lay hold. In 
India, there is the existence, within and alongside the 
austere worship of the unconditioned Brahma, of 
the ardent personal Vaishnavlte devotion to the 
heart's Lord, known as Bhaktl Marga. In Islam, 
there is the impassioned longing of the Sufis for the 
Beloved, who is "the Rose of all Reason and all 
Truth." 

"Without Thee, O Beloved, I cannot rest; 

Thy goodness towards me I cannot reckon. 

Tho' every hair on my body becomes a tongue 

A thousandth part of the thanks due to Thee I cannot tell." ^ 

There is the sudden note of rapture which startles 
us in the Neoplatonists, as when Plotlnus speaks of 
"the flame of love for what is there to know — the 
passion of the lover resting on the bosom of his 
love." 2 Surely we may accept all these, as the in- 

1 Bishr-i-Yasin, cf. Nicholson, op. cit., loc. cit. 

2 Ennead VI. 9. 4. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 19 

stinctive responses of a diversity of spirits to the 
one eternal Spirit of life and love: and recognize 
that without such personal response, such a dis- 
covery of Imperishable love, a fully lived spiritual 
life is no more possible than is a fully lived physical 
life from which love has been left out. 

When we descend from experience to Interpreta- 
tion, the paradoxical character of such a personal 
sense of Intimacy is eased for us, if we remember 
that the religious man's awareness of the indwelling 
Spirit, or of a Divine companionship — whatever 
name he gives it — is just his limited realization, 
achieved by means of his own mental machinery, of 
a universal and not a particular truth. To this 
realization he brings all his human — more, his sub- 
human — feelings and experiences: not only those 
which are vaguely called his spiritual intuitions, but 
the full weight of his impulsive and emotional life. 
His experience and its interpretation are, then, in- 
evitably condltoned by this appercelving mass. 
And here I think the intellect should show mercy, 
and not probe without remorse Into those tender 
places where the heart and the spirit are at one. 
Let us then be content to note, that when we consult 
the works of those who have best and most fully 
interpreted their religion In a universal sense, we 
find how careful they are to provide a category for 
this experience of a personally known and loved in- 
dwelling Divinity — man's Father, Lover, Saviour, 
ever-present Companion — which shall avoid its 



20 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

identification with the mere spirit of Nature, whilst 
safeguarding its immanence no less than its trans- 
cendent quality. Thus, Julian of Norwich heard 
in her meditations the voice of God saying to her, 
"See! I am in all things! See! I lift never mine 
hand from off my works, nor ever shall!" ^ Is 
it possible to state more plainly the indivisible 
identity of the Spirit of Life? "See! I am in all 
things!" In the terrific energies of the stellar uni- 
verse, and the smallest song of the birds. In the 
seething struggle of modern industrialism, as much 
a part of nature, of those works on which His hands 
are laid, as the more easily comprehended economy 
of the ant-heap and the hive. This sense of the per- 
sonal presence of an abiding Reality, fulfilling and 
transcending all our highest values, here in our 
space-time world of effort, may well be regarded as 
the differential mark of real spiritual experience, 
wherever found. It chimes well with the definition 
of Professor Pratt, who observes that the truly 
spiritual man, though he may not be any better mor- 
ally than his non-religious neighbour, "has a confi- 
dence in the universe and an inner joy which the 
other does not know — is more at home in the uni- 
verse as a whole, than other men." ^ 

If, in their attempt to describe their experience of 
this companioning Reality, spiritual men of all types 
have exhausted all the resources and symbols of 

1 "Revelations of Divine Love," Cap. ii. 

2 Pratt: "The Religious Consciousness," Cap. 2. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 21 

poetry, even earthly lovers are obliged to do that, In 
order to suggest a fraction of the values contained 
in earthly love. Such a divine presence is dram- 
atized for Christianity In the historic Incarnation, 
though not limited by It : and it Is continued into his- 
tory by the beautiful 'Christian conception of the 
eternal indwelling Christ. The distinction made by 
the Bhakti form of Hinduism between the Manifest 
and the Unmanlfest God seeks to express this same 
truth; and shows that this Idea, In one form or 
another, Is a necessity for religious thought. 

Further and detailed Illustration of spiritual ex- 
perience in Itself, as a genuine and abiding human 
fact — a form of life — Independent of the dogmatic 
interpretations put on It, will come up as we proceed. 
I now wish to go on to a second point : this — that it 
follows that any complete description of human 
life as we know It, must find room for the spiritual 
factor, and for that religious life and temper in 
which it finds expression. This place must be 
found, not merely In the phenomenal series, as we 
might find room for any special human activity or 
aberration, from the medicine-man to the Jumping 
Perfectionists; but deep-set In the enduring stuff of 
man's true life. We must believe that the union of 
this life with supporting Spirit cannot in fact be 
broken, any more than the organic unity of the earth 
with the universe as a whole. But the extent in 
which we find and feel it is the measure of the full- 
ness of spiritual life that we enjoy. Organic union 



22 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

must be lifted to conscious realization: and this to 
do, is the business of religion. In this act of reali- 
zation each aspect of the psychic life — thought, will 
and feeling — must have its part, and from each must 
be evoked a response. Only in so far as such all- 
round realization and response are achieved by us 
do we live the spiritual life. We do it perhaps in 
some degree, every time that we surrender to pure 
beauty or unselfish devotion; for then all but the 
>j most insensitive must be conscious of an unearthly 
touch, and hear the cadence of a heavenly melody. 
In these partial experiences something, as it were, 
of the richness of Reality overflows and is expe- 
rienced by us. But it is in the wholeness of response 
characteristic of religion — that uncalculated re- 
sponse to stimulus which is the mark of the instinc- 
tive life — that this Realty of love and power is most 
truly found and felt by us. In this generous and 
heart-searching surrender of religion, rightly made, 
the self achieves inner harmony, and finds a satis- 
fying objective for all its cravings and energies. It 
then finds its life, and the possibilities before it, to 
be far greater than it knew. 

We need not claim that those men and women 
who have most fully realized, and so at first hand 
have described to us, this life of the Spirit, have nei- 
ther discerned or communicated the ultimate truth of 
things: nor need we claim that the symbols they 
use have intrinsic value, beyond the poetic power of 
suggesting to us the quality and wonder of their 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 23 

transfigured lives. Still less must we claim this dis- 
covery as the monopoly of any one system of reli- 
gion. But we can and ought to claim, that no sys- 
tem shall be held satisfactory which does not find^ 
place for it: and that only in so far as we at least 
apprehend and respond to the world's spiritual as- 
pect, do we approach the full stature of humanity. 
Psychologists at present are much concerned to en- 
treat us to "face reality," discarding IdeaHsm along 
with the other phantasies that haunt the race. Yet 
this facing of reality can hardly be complete If we 
do not face the facts of the spiritual life. Certainly 
we shall find It most difficult to Interpret these facts; 
they are confused, and more than one reading of 
them Is possible. But still we cannot leave them 
out and claim to have "faced reality." 

Hoffding goes so far as to say that any real re- 
ligion Implies and must give us a world-view.^ 
And I think It Is true that any vividly lived spiritual 
life must, as soon as It passes beyond the level of 
mere feelmg and Involves reflection. Involve too 
some more or less articulated conception of the 
spiritual universe. In harmony with which that life is 
to be lived. This may be given to us by authority, 
In the form of creed: but If we do not thus receive 
it, we are committed to the building of our own City 
of God. And to-day, that world-view, that spirit- 
ual landscape, must harmonize — if It is needed to 
help our living — with the outlook, the cosmic map, 

1 Hoffding: "Philosophy of Religion," Pt. II, A 



24 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

of the ordinary man. If it be adequate, it will in- 
evitably transcend this; but must not be in hopeless 
conflict with it. The stretched-out, graded, striving 
world of biological evolution, the many-faced uni- 
verse of the physical relativist, the space-time mani- 
fold of realist philosophy — these great constructions 
of human thought, so often ignored by the religious 
mind, must on the contrary be grasped, and accom- 
modated to the world-view which centres on the God 
known in religious experience. They are true 
within their own systems of reference; and the soul 
demands a synthesis wide enough to contain them. 

It is true that most religious systems, at least of 
the traditional type, do purport to give us a world- 
view, a universe, in which devotional experience is 
at home and finds an objective and an explanation. 
They give us a self-consistent symbolic world in 
which to live. But it is a world which is almost 
unrelated to the universe of modern physics, and 
emerges in a very dishevelled state from the explo- 
rations of history and of psychology. Even con- 
trasted with our every-day unresting strenuous life, 
it is rather like a conservatory in a wilderness. 
Whilst we are inside everything seems all right. 

Beauty and fragrance surround us. But emerg- 
ing from its doors, we find ourselves meeting the 
cold glances of those who deal in other kinds of 
reality; and discover that such spiritual life as we 
possess has got to accommodate itself to the condi- 
tions in which they live. If the claim of religion be 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 25 

true at all, It is plain that the conservatory-type of 
spiritual world Is Inconsistent with It. Imperfect 
though any conception we frame of the universe 
must be — and here we may keep In mind Samuel 
Butler's warning that "there Is no such source of 
error as the pursuit of absolute truth'' — still, a view 
which is controlled by the religious factor ought to 
be, so to speak, a hill-top view. Lifting us up to 
higher levels, it ought to give us a larger synthesis. 
Hence, the wider the span of experience which we 
are able to bring within our system, the more valid 
its claim becomes: and the setting apart of spiritual 
experience In a special compartment, the keeping of 
It under glass, is daily becoming less possible. 
That experience Is life in its fullness, or nothing at 
all. Therefore it must come out Into the open, and 
must witness to Its own most sacred conviction; 
that the universe as a whole Is a religious fact, and 
man is not living completely until he Is living in a 
world religiously conceived. 

More and more, as it seems to me, philosophy 
moves toward this reading of existence. The re- 
volt from the last century's materialism is almost 
complete. In religious language, abstract thought 
is again finding and feeling God within the world; 
and finding too in this discovery and realization the 
meaning, and perhaps — if we may dare to use such 
a word — the purpose of life. It suggests — and 
here, more and more, psychology supports it — that, 
real and alive as we are in relation to this system 



26 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

with which we find ourselves in correspondence, yet 
we are not so real, nor so alive, as it is possible to 
be. The characters of our psychic life point us on 
and up to other levels. Already we perceive that 
man's universe is no fixed order; and that the many 
ways in which he is able to apprehend it are earnests 
of a greater transfiguration, a more profound con- 
tact with reality yet possible to him. Higher forms 
of realization, a wider span of experience, a sharp- 
ening of our v^ague, uncertain consciousness of value 
— these may well be before us. We have to re- 
member how dim, tentative, half-understood a great 
deal of our so-called "normal" experience is: how 
narrow the little field of consciousness, how small 
the number of impressions it picks up from the rich 
flux of existence, how subjective the picture It con- 
structs from them. To take only one obvious ex- 
ample, artists and poets have given us plenty of 
hints that a real beauty and significance which we 
seldom notice lie at our very doors; and forbid us 
to contradict the statement of religion that God is 
standing there too. 

That thought which inspires the last chapters of 
Professor Alexander's "Space, Time, and Deity,'* 
that the universe as a whole has a tendency towards 
deity, does at least seem true of the fully awak- 
ened human consciousness.^ Though St. Thomas 
Aquinas may not have covered all the facts when 
he called man a contemplative animal, ^ he came 

1 Op. cit., Bk. 4, Cap. i. 

2 "Summa contra Gentiles," L. III. Cap. 37. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 27 

nearer the mark than more modern anthropol- 
ogists. Man has an ineradicable impulse to tran- 
scendence, though sometimes — as we may admit- — 
it is expressed in strange ways: and no psychology 
which fails to take account of it can be accepted by / 
us as complete. He has a craving which nothing 
in his material surroundings seems adequate either 
to awaken or to satisfy; a deep conviction that 
some larger synthesis of experience i^ possible to 
him. The sense that we are not yet full grown has 
always haunted the race. "I am the Food of the 
full-grown. Grow, and thou shalt feed on Me!" ^ 
said the voice of supreme Reality to St. Augustine. 
Here we seem to lay our finger on the distinguishing 
mark of humanity: that in man the titanic craving 
for a fuller life and love which is characteristic of 
all living things, has a teleological objective. He 
alone guesses that he may or should be something 
other; yet cannot guess what he may be. And from 
this vague sense of being in via, the restlessness and 
discord of his nature proceed. In him, the on- 
ward thrust of the world of becoming achieves self- 
consciousness. 

The best individuals and communities of each age 
have felt this craving and conviction; and obeyed, 
in a greater or less degree, its persistent onward 
push. "The seed of the new birth," says William 
Law, "is not a notion, but a real strong essential 
hunger, an attracting, a magnetic desire.^ Over and 

lAug: Conf. VII, lo. 

2 "The Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p. 154. 



28 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

over again, rituals have dramatized this desire and 
saints have surrendered to it. The history of re- 
ligion and philosophy is really the history of the pro- 
found human belief that we have faculties capable 
of responding to orders of truth which, did we ap- 
prehend them, would change the whole character of 
our universe; showing us reality from another an- 
gle, lit by another light. And time after time too 
— as we shall see, when we come to consider the 
testimony of history — favourable variations have 
arisen within the race and proved in their own 
persons that this claim is true. Often at the cost of 
great pain, sacrifice, and inward conflict they have 
broken their attachments to the narrow world of 
the senses : and this act of detachment has been re- 
paid by a new, more lucid vision, and a mighty in- 
flow of power. The principle of degrees assures 
us that such changed levels of consciousness and 
angles of approach may well involve introduc- 
tion into a universe of new relations, which we are 
not competent to criticize.^ This is a truth which 
should make us humble in our efforts to understand 
the difficult and too often paradoxical utterances of 
religious genius. It suggests that the puzzlings of 
philosophers and theologians — and, I may add, of 
psychologists too — over experiences which they 
have not shared, are not of great authority for those 
whose object is to find the secret of the Spirit, and 
make it useful for life. Here, the only witnesses 
we can receive are, on the one part, the first-hand 

1 Cf. Haldane, "The Reign of Relativity." Cap. VI. 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 29 

witnesses of experience, and on the other part, our 
own profound Instinct that these are telling us news 
of our native land. 

Baron von Hiigel has finely said, that the facts of 
this spiritual life are themselves the earnests of its 
objective. These facts cannot be explained merely 
as man's share in the cosmic movement towards a 
yet unrealized perfection; such as the unachieved 
and self-evolving Divinity of some realist philoso- 
phers. *'For we have no other instance of an un- 
realized perfection producing such pain and joy, 
such volitions, such endlessly varied and real re- 
sults; and all by means of just this vivid and persist- 
ent impression that this Becoming is an already re- 
alized Perfection." ^ Therefore though the irresist- 
ible urge and the effort forward, experienced on high- 
est levels of love and service, are plainly one-half 
of the life of the Spirit — which can never be consis- 
tent with a pious indolence, an acceptance of things 
as they are, either in the social or the individual life 
— yet, the other half, and the very inspiration of 
that striving, is this certitude of an untarnlshable 
Perfection, a great goal really there; a living God 
Who draws all spirits to Himself. "Our quest," 
said Plotinus, "is of an End, not of ends : for that 
only can be chosen by us which is ultimate and 
noblest, that which calls forth the tenderest long- 
ings of our soul." ^ 

iVon Hugel: "Eternal Life," p. 385. 
2 Ennead I. 4, 6. 



^Q THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

There is of course a sense in which such a life 
of the Spirit is the same yesterday, to-day and for 
ever. Even if we consider it in relation to historical 
time, the span within which it has appeared is so 
short, compared with the ages of human evolution, 
that we may as well regard it as still in the stage 
of undifferentiated infancy. Yet even babies change, 
and change quickly, in their relations with the ex- 
ternal world. And though the universe with which 
man's childish spirit is in contact be a world of en- 
during values; yet, placed as we are in the stream 
of succession, part of the stuff of a changing world 
and linked at every point with it, our apprehensions 
of this life of spirit, the symbols we use to describe 
it — and we must use symbols — must inevitably 
change too. Therefore from time to time some 
restatement becomes imperative, if actuality is not 
to be lost. Whatever God meant man to do or to 
be, the whole universe assures us that He did not 
mean him to stand still. Such a restatement, then, 
may reasonably be called a truly religious work: 
and I believe that it is indeed one of the chief 
works to which religion must find itself committed 
in the near future. Hence my main object in this 
book is to recommend the consideration of this 
enduring fact of the life of the Spirit and what 
it can mean to us, from various points of view; 
thus helping to prepare the ground for that new 
synthesis which we may not yet be able to achieve, 
but towards which we ought to look. It is from 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 31 

this stand-point, and with this object of examining 
what we have, of sorting out if we can the per- 
manent from the transitory, of noticing lacks and 
bridging cleavages, that we shall consider in turn 
the testimony of history, the position in respect of 
psychology, and the institutional personal and social 
aspects of the spiritual life. '^' 

In such a restatement, such a reference back to 
actual man, here at the present day as we have 
him — such a demand for a spiritual Interpretation 
of the universe, which will allow us to fit In all his 
many-levelled experiences — I believe we have the 
way of approach to which religion to-day must 
look as Its best hope. Thus only can we conquer 
that museum-like atmosphere of much traditional 
piety which — agreeable as It may be to the historic 
or aesthetic sense — makes It so unreal to our work- 
ers, no less than to our students. Such a method, 
too, will mean the tightening of that alliance be- 
tween philosophy and psychology which is already 
a marked character of contemporary thought.--^ 

And note that, working on this basis, we need 
not In order to find room for the facts commit our- 
selves to the harsh dualism, the opposition between 
nature and spirit, which Is characteristic of some 
earlier forms of Christian thought. In this dualism, 
too, we find simply an effort to describe felt ex- 
perience. It Is an expression of the fact, so strongly 
and deeply felt by the richest natures, that there 7' j 
an utter difference In kind between the natural life of 



32 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

use and wont, as most of us live it, and the life that 
is dominated by the spiritual consciousness. The 
change is indeed so great, the transfiguration so com- 
plete, that they seize on the strongest language in 
which to state it. And in the good old human 
way, referring their own feelings to the universe, 
they speak of the opposing and incompatible worlds 
of matter and of spirit, of nature and of grace. 
But those who have most deeply reflected, have per- 
ceived that the change effected is not a change of 
worlds. It is rather such a change of temper and 
attitude as will disclose within our one world, here 
and now, the one Spirit in the diversity of His 
gifts; the one Love, in homeliest incidents as well 
as noblest vision, laying its obligations on the soul; 
and so the true nature and full possibilities of 
this our present life. 

Although it is true that we must register our pro- 
found sense of the transcendental character of this 
spirit-life, its otherness from mere nature, and the 
humility and penitence in which alone mere nature 
can receive it; yet I think that our movement from 
one to the other is more naturally described by us in 
the language of growth than in the language of 
convulsion. The primal object of religion is to dis- 
close to us this perdurable basis of life, and foster 
our growth into communion with it. And whatever 
its special language and personal colour may be — 
for all our news of God comes to us through the 
consciousness of individual men, and arrives tine- 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 33 

tured by their feelings and beliefs — In the end it 
does this by disclosing us to ourselves as spirits 
growing up, though unevenly and hampered by our 
past, through the physical order into completeness of 
response to a universe that is Itself a spiritual fact. 
*'Heaven," said Jacob Boehme, *'Is nothing else but 
a manifestation of the Eternal One, wherein all 
worketh and wllleth In quiet love." ^ Such a man- 
ifestation of Spirit must clearly be made through 
humanity, at least so far as our own order is con- 
cerned: by our redirection and full use of that spirit 
of life which energizes us, and which, emerging from 
the more primitive levels of organic creation, is ours 
to carry on and up — either to new self-satisfactions, 
or to new consecrations. 

It Is hardly worth while to Insist that the need 
for such a redirection has never been more strongly 
felt than at the present day. There is Indeed no 
period in which history exhibits mankind as at once 
more active, more feverishly self-conscious, and 
more distracted, than is our own bewildered gen- 
eration; nor any which stood in greater need of 
Blake's exhortation: 'Xet every Christian as much 
as in him lies, engage himself openly and publicly be- 
fore all the World In some Mental pursuit for the 
Building up of Jerusalem." ^ 

How many people do each of us know who work 
and will in quiet love, and thus participate in eternal 
life? 

1 Boehme: "The V^ay to Christ," Pt. IV. 

2 Blake: "Jerusalem": To the Christians. 



34 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Consider the weight of each of these words. 
The energy, the clear purpose, the deep calm, the 
warm charity they imply. Willed work, not 
grudging toil. Quiet love, not feverish emo- 
tionalism. Each term is quite plain and human, 
and each has equal importance as an attribute of 
heavenly life. How many politicians — the people 
to whom we have confided the control of our 
national existence — work and will in quiet lovq? 
What about industry? Do the masters, or the 
workers, work and will In quiet love? that is to say, 
with diligence and faithful purpose, without selfish 
anxiety, without selfish demands and hostilities? 
What about the hurried, ugly and devitalizing ex- 
istence of our big towns? Can we honestly say 
that young people reared in them are likely to 
acquire this temper of heaven? Yet we have been 
given the secret, the law of spiritual life; and 
psychologists would agree that it represents too the 
most favourable of conditions for a full psychic 
life, the state in which we have access to all our 
sources of power. 

But man will not achieve this state unless he 
dwells on the idea of it; and, dwelling on that idea, 
opening his mind to its suggestions, brings its modes 
of expression Into harmony with his thought about 
the world of dally life. Our spiritual life to-day, 
such as it is, tends above all to express itself in social 
activities. Teacher after teacher comes forward to 
plume himself on the fact that Christianity is now 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 35 

taking a "social form'*; that love of our neighbour 
is not so much the corollary as the equivalent of the 
love of God, and so forth. Here I am sure that 
all can supply themselves with Illustrative quota- 
tions. Yet is there In this state of things nothing 
but food for congratulation? Is such a view com- 
plete? Is nothing left out? Have we not lost the 
wonder and poetry of the forest In our diligent 
cultivation of the economically valuable trees; and 
shall we ever see life truly until we see it with the 
poet's eyes? There Is so much meritorious working 
and willing; and so little time left for quiet love. A 
spiritual fusslness — often a material fusslness too — 
seems to be taking the place of that Inward resort to 
the fontal sources of our being which Is the true 
religious act, our chance of contact with the Spirit. 
This compensating beat of the fully lived human 
life, that whole side of existence resumed In the word 
contemplation, has been left out. *'A11 the artillery 
of the world," said John Everard, "were they all 
discharged together at one clap, could not more 
deaf the ears of our bodies than the clamourlngs of 
desires In the soul deaf its ears, so you see a man 
must go into the silence, or else he cannot hear God 
speak." ^ And until we remodel our current concep- 
tion of the Christian life In such a sense as to give 
that silence and Its revelation their full value, I do 
not think that we can hope to exhibit the triumphing 
power of the Spirit in human character and human 

1 "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 600. 



36 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

society. Our whole notion of life at present is such 
as to set up resistances to its inflow. Yet the Inner 
mood, the consciousness, which makes of the self its 
channel, are accessible to all, If we would but believe 
this and act on our belief. "Worship," said 
William Penn, "Is the supreme act of a man's life.'' ^ 
And what Is worship but a reach-out of the finite 
spirit towards Infinite Life? Here thought must 
mend the breach which thought has made: for the 
root of our trouble consists in the fact that there Is 
a fracture in our conception of God and of our rela- 
tion with Him. We do not perceive the "hidden 
unity In the Eternal Being"; the single nature and 
purpose of that Spirit which brought life forth, and 
shall lead It to full realization. 

Here is our little planet, chiefly occupied, to our 
view, in rushing round the sun; but perhaps found 
from another angle to fill quite another part in the 
cosmic scheme. And on this apparently unimpor- 
tant speck, wandering among systems of suns, the ap- 
pearance of life and its slow development and ever- 
increasing sensitization; the emerging of pain and 
of pleasure; and presently man with his growing 
capacity for self-afl^rmation and self-sacrifice, for 
rapture and for grief. Love with Its unearthly hap- 
piness,, unmeasured devotion, and limitless pain; all 
the ecstasy, all the angulsli^>that we extract from the 
rhythm of life and death. It is much, really, for 
one little planet to bring to birth. And presently 

1 William Penn, "No Cross, No Crown." 



THE CHARACTERS OF SPIRITUAL LIFE 37 

another music, v/hlch some — not many perhaps yet, 
In comparison with Its population — are able to 
hear. The music of a more inward life, a sort of 
fugue In which the eternal and temporal are min- 
gled; and here and there some, already, who 
respond to it. Those who hear It would not all 
agree as to the nature of the melody; but all would 
agree that it Is something different In kind from the 
rhythm of life and death. And in their surrender 
to this — to which, as they feel sure, the physical or- 
der too is really keeping time — they taste a larger 
life; more universal, more divine. As Plotinus 
said, they are looking at the Conductor In the midst; 
and, keeping time with Him, find the fulfilment both 
of their striving and of their peace. 



CHAPTER II 

HISTORY AKI> THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Wc have already agreed that, If we wish to grasp 
the real character of spiritual life, we must avoid 
the temptation to look at It as merely a historical 
subject. If it Is what It claims to be, it Is a form 
of eternal life, as constant, as accessible to us here 
and now, as In any so-called age of faith: therefore 
of actual and present importance, or else nothing at 
all. This is why I think that the approach to It 
through philosophy and psychology Is so much to be 
preferred to the approach through pure history. 
Yet there is a sense in which we must not neglect 
such history; for here, if we try to enter by sympa- 
thy into the past, we can see the life of the Spirit 
emerging and being lived in all degrees of perfection 
and under many different forms. Here, through 
and behind the immense diversity of temperaments 
which It has transfigured, we can best realize Its uni- 
form and enduring character; and therefore our 
own possibility of attaining to it, and the way that 
we must tread so to do. History does not exhort us 
or explain to us, but exhibits living specimens to us; 
and these specimens witness again and again to the 
fact that a compelling power does exist In the world 

38 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 39 

— little understood, even by those who are Inspired 
by It — which presses men to transcend their mate- 
rial limitations and mental conflicts, and live a new 
creative life of harmony, freedom and joy. Di- 
rectly human character emerges as one of man's 
prime interests, this possibility emerges too, and is 
never lost sight of again. Hindu, Buddhist, 
Egyptian, Greek, Alexandrian, Moslem and Chris- 
tian all declare with more or less completeness a way 
of life, a path, a curve of development which shall 
end in its attainment; and history brings us face to 
face with the real and human men and women who 
have followed this way, and found its promise to be 
true. 

It IS, indeed, of supreme Importance to us that 
these men and women did truly and actually thus 
grow, suffer and attain: did so feel the pressure of 
a more intense life, and the demand of a more 
authentic love. Their adventures, whatsoever ad- 
dition legend may have made to them, belong at bot- 
tom to the realm of fact, of realistic happening, not 
of phantasy: and therefore speak not merely to our 
imagination but to our will. Unless the spiritual 
life were thus a part of history, it could only have 
for us the interest of a noble dream : an interest ac- 
tually less than that of great poetry, for this has at 
least been given to us by man's hard passionate work 
of expressing in concrete image — and ever the more 
concrete, the greater his art — the results of his tran- 
scendental contacts with Beauty, Power or Love. 



40 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Thus, as the tracking-out of a concrete life, a Man, 
from Nazareth to Calvary, made of Christianity a 
veritable human revelation of God and not a 
Gnostic answer to the riddle of the soul; so the 
real and solid men and women of the Spirit — eatin;^, 
drinking, working, suffering, loving, each in the cir- 
cumstances of their own time — are the earnests cf 
our own latent destiny and powers, the ability of 
the Christian to "grow taller in Christ." ^ These 
powers — that ability — are factually present in the 
race, and are totally independent of the specific 
religious system which may best awaken, nourish, 
and cause them to grow. 

In order, then, that we may be from the first 
clear of all suspicion of vague romancing about in- 
definite types of perfection and keep tight hold on 
concrete life, let us try to re-enter history, and look 
at the quality of life exhibited by some of these 
great examples of dynamic spirituality, and the 
movements which they initiated. It is true that 
we can only select from among them, but we will 
try to keep to those who have followed on highest 
levels a normal course; the upstanding types, varying 
much in temperament but little in aim and achieve- 
ment, of that form of life which is re-made and 
controlled by the Spirit, entinctured with Eternal 
Life. If such a use of history is indeed to be 
educative for us, we must avoid the conventional 
view of it, as a mere chronicle of past events; and 

^ Everard, "Some Gospel Treasures Opened," p. 555. 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 41 

of historic personalities as stuffed specimens ex- 
hibited against a flat tapestried background, more 
or less picturesque, but always thought of in op- 
position to the concrete thickness of the modern 
world. We are not to think of spiritual epochs 
now closed; of ages of faith utterly separated from 
us; of saints as some peculiar species, God's pet 
animals, living in an incense-laden atmosphere and 
less vividly human and various than ourselves. 
Such conceptions are empty of historical content in 
the philosophic sense; and when we are dealing 
with the accredited heroes of the Spirit — that is 
to say, with the Saints — they are particularly com- 
mon and particularly poisonous. As Benedetto 
Croce has observed, the very condition of the exlst- 
tence of real history Is that the deed celebrated must 
live and be present In the soul of the historian; 
must be emotionally realized by him now, as a 
concrete fact weighted with significance. It must 
answer to a present, not to a past Interest of the race, 
for thus alone can It convey to us some knowledge 
of its inward truth. 

Consider from this point of view the case of 
Richard Rolle, who has been called the father of 
English mysticism. It is easy enough for those 
who regard spiritual history as dead chronicle and 
Its subjects as something different from ourselves, 
to look upon Rolle's threefold experience of the 
soul's reaction to God — the heat of his quick love, 
the sweetness of his spiritual intercourse, the joyous 



42 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

melody with which it filled his austere, self-giving 
life * — as the probable result of the reaction of a 
neurotic temperament to mediaeval traditions. But 
if, for instance the Oxford undergraduate of to- 
day realizes Rolle, not as a picturesque fourteenth- 
century hermit, but as a fellow-student — another 
Oxford undergraduate, separated from him only by 
an interval of time — who gave up that university 
and the career it could offer him, under the com- 
pulsion of another Wisdom and another Love, then 
he re-enters the living past. If, standing by him in 
that small hut in the Yorkshire wolds, from which 
the urgent message of new life spread through the 
north of England, he hears Rolle saying "Nought 
more profitable, nought merrier than grace of con- 
templation, the which liftcth us from low things and 
presenteth us to God. What thing is grace but be- 
ginning of joy? And what is perfection of joy but 
grace complete?" ^ — if, I say, he so re-enters his- 
tory that he can hear this as Rolle meant it, not 
as a poetic phrase but as a living fact, indeed life's 
very secret — then, his heart may be touched and 
he may begin to understand. And then it may 
occur to him that this ardour, and the sacrifice it 
impelled, the hard life which it supported, witness 
to another level of being; reprove his own languor 
and comfort, his contentment with a merely phys- 
ical and mental life, and are not wholly to be ac- 

^Canor Dulcor, Canor; cf. Rolle: "The Fire of Love," Bk. I, 
Cap. 14. 

2 Rolle: "The Mending of Life," Cap. XIL 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 43 

counted for In terms of superstition or of pathology. 

When the living spirit In us thus meets the living 
spirit of the past, our time-span is enlarged, and 
history is born and becomes contemporary; thus 
both widening and deepening our vital experience. 
It then becomes not only a real mode of life to us; 
but more than this, a mode of social life. Indeed, 
we can hardly hope without this re-entrance into 
the time stream to achieve by ourselves, and 
in defiance of tradition, a true integration of exist- 
ence. Thus to defy tradition Is to refuse all the 
gifts the past can make to us, and cut ourselves off 
from the cumulative experiences of the race. The 
Spirit, as Croce ^ reminds us, is history, makes his- 
tory, and is also Itself the living result of all pre- 
ceding history; since Becoming is the essential reality, 
the creative formula, of that life in which we find 
ourselves Immersed. 

It Is from such an angle as this that I wish to 
approach the historical aspect of the life of Spirit; 
re-entering the past by sympathetic imagination, 
refusing to be misled by superficial characteristics, 
but seeking the concrete factors of the regenerate 
life, the features which persist and have significance 
for it — getting. If we can, face to face with those 
intensely living men and women who have mani- 
fested it. This is not easy. In studying all such 
experience, we have to remember that the men and 
women of the Spirit are members of two orders. 

1 Benedetto Croce: "Theory and History of Historiography," 
trans, by Douglas Ainslie, p. 25. 



44 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

They have attachments both to time and to eternlty. 
Their characteristic experiences indeed are non- 
temporal, but their feet are on the earth; the earth 
of their own day. Therefore two factors will in- 
evitably appear in those experiences, one due to 
tradition, the other to the free movements of crea- 
tive life: and we, if we would understand, must dis- 
criminate between them. In this power of taking 
from the past and pushing on to the future, the bal- 
ance maintained between stability and novelty, we 
find one of their abiding characteristics. When this 
balance is broken — when there is either too complete 
a submission to tradition and authority, or too vi- 
olent a rejection of it — full greatness is not achieved. 

In complete lives, the two things overlap: and 
so perfectly that no sharp distinction is made be- 
tween the gifts of authority and of fresh experience. 
Traditional formulae, as we all know, are often used 
because they are found to tally with life, to light 
up dark corners of our own spirits and give names 
to experiences which we want to define. Ceremonial 
deeds are used to actualize free contacts with Real- 
ity. And we need not be surprised that they can 
do this; since tradition represents the crystallization, 
and handing on under symbols, of all the spiritual 
experiences of the race. 

Therefore the man or woman of the Spirit will 
always accept and use somef tradition; and unless he 
does so, he is not of much use to his fellow-men. 
He must not, then, be discredited on account of the 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 45 

symbolic system he adopts; but must be allowed 
to tell his news In his own way. We must not 
refuse to find reality within the Hindu's account 
of his joyous life-giving communion with Ram, any 
more than we refuse to find It within the Christian's 
description of his personal converse with Christ. 
We must not discredit the assurance which comes 
to the devout Buddhist who faithfully follows the 
Middle Way, or deny that Pagan sacramentalism 
was to Its Initiates a channel of grace. For all these 
are children of tradition, occupy a given place In the 
stream of history; and commonly they are better, 
not worse, for accepting this fact with all that It 
Involves. And on the other hand, as we shall see 
when we come to discuss the laws of suggestion and 
the function of belief, the weight of tradition presses 
the loyal and humble soul which accepts it, to such 
an interpretation of Its own spiritual intuitions as 
Its Church, Its creed. Its environment give to It. 
Thus St. Catherine of Genoa, St. Teresa, even 
Ruysbroeck, are able to describe their intuitive com- 
munion with God In strictly Catholic terms; and by 
so doing renew, enrich and explicate the content of 
those terms for those who follow them. Those 
who could not harmonize their own vision of reality 
with the current formulae — Fox, Wesley or Blake, 
driven into opposition by the sterility of the con- 
temporary Church — were forced to find elsewhere 
some tradition through which to maintain contact 
with the past. Fox found It In the Bible; Wesley 



46 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

In patristic Christianity. Even Blake's prophetic 
system, when closely examined, Is found to have 
many historic and Christian connections. And all 
these regarded themselves far less as brlngers-In 
of novelty, than as restorers of lost truth. So we 
must be prepared to discriminate the element of 
novelty from the element of stability; the reality of 
the intuition, the curve of growth, the moral situa- 
tion, from the traditional and often symbolic lan- 
guage in which it is given to us. The comparative 
method helps us towards this; and is thus not, as 
some would pretend, the servant of scepticism, but 
rightly used the revealer of the Spirit of Life In its 
variety of gifts. In this connection we might re- 
member that time — like space — is only of secondary 
importance to us. Compared with the eons of 
preparation, the millions of years of our animal 
and sub-human existence, the life of the Spirit as it 
appears in human history might well be regarded 
as simultaneous rather than successive. We may 
borrow the imagery of Donne's great discourse on 
Eternity and say, that those heroic livers of the 
spiritual life whom we Idly class in comparison with 
ourselves as antique, or mediaeval men, were "but 
as a bed of flowers some gathered at six, some at 
seven, some at eight — all in one morning in respect 
of this day." ^ 

Such a view brings them more near to us, helps 
us to neglect mere differences of language and ap- 

1 "Donne's Sermons," p. 236. 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 47 

pearance, and grasp the warmly living and con- 
temporary character of all historic truth. It pre- 
serves us, too, from the common error of discrimin- 
ating between so-called *'ages of faith" and our own. 
The more we study the past, the more clearly we 
recognize that there are no "ages of faith." Such 
labels merely represent the arbitrary cuts which we 
make In the time-stream, the arbitrary colours which 
we give to it. The spiritual man or woman Is al- 
ways fundamentally the same kind of man or 
woman; always reaching out with the same faith 
and love towards the heart of the same universe, 
though telling that faith and love In various tongues. 
He Is far less the child of his time, than the 
transformer of It. His this-world business Is to 
bring in novelty, new reality, fresh life. Yet, com- 
ing to fulfil not to destroy, he uses for this purpose 
the traditions, creeds, even the Institutions of his 
day. But when he has done with them, they do not 
look the same as they did before. Christ himself 
has be^ well called a Constructive Revolutionary,^ 
yet each single element of His teaching can be found 
in Jewish tradition; and the noblest of His followers 
have the same character. Thus St. Francis of As- 
slsl only sought consistently to apply the teaching of 
the New Testament, and St. Teresa that of the 
Carmelite Rule. Every element of Wesleyanism is 
to be found in primitive Christianity; and Wesleyan- 
ism Is itself the tradition from which the new vigour 

IB. H. Streeter, in "The Spirit," p. 349 seq. 



48 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

of the Salvation Army sprang. The great regen- 
erators of history are always in fundamental op- 
position to the common life of their day, for they 
demand by their very existence a return to first 
principles, a revolution in the ways of thinking and 
of acting common among men, a heroic consistency 
and single-mindedness: but they can use for their 
own fresh constructions and contacts with Eternal 
Life the material which this life offers to them. 
The experiments of St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox 
or Wesley, were not therefore the natural products 
of ages of faith. They each represented the revolt 
of a heroic soul against surrounding apathy and 
decadence; an invasion of novelty; a sharp break 
with society, a new use of antique tradition depend- 
ing on new contacts with the Spirit. Greatness is 
seldom in harmony with its own epoch, and spiritual 
greatness least of all. It is usually startlingly mod- 
ern, even eccentric at the time at which it appears. 
We are accustomed to think of "The Imitation of 
Christ" as the classic expression of mediaeval spiritu- 
ality. But when Thomas a Kempis wrote his book, 
it was the manifesto of that which was called the 
Modern Devotion; and represented a new attempt 
to live the life of the Spirit, in opposition to sur- 
rounding apathy. 

When we re-enter the past, what we find there Is 
the persistent conflict between this novelty and this 
apathy; that is to say between man's instinct for 
transcendence, in which we discern the pressure of 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 49 

the Spirit and the earnest of his future, and his 
tendency to lag behind towards animal levels, In 
which we see the Influence of his racial past. So 
far as the Individual Is concerned, all that religion 
means by grace Is resumed under the first head, 
much that It means by sin under the second head. 
And the most striking — though not the only — ex- 
amples of the forward reach of life towards freedom 
(that is, of conquering grace) are those persons 
whom we call men and women of the Spirit. In 
them it is incarnate, and through them, as It were, 
it spreads and gives the race a lift: for their trans- 
figuration is never for themselves alone, they impart 
it to all who follow them. But the downward fall- 
ing movement ever dogs the emerging life of spirit; 
and tends to drag back to the average level the 
group these have vivified, when their influence Is 
withdrawn. Hence the history of the Spirit — and, 
irfcidentally, the history of all churches — exhibits to 
us a series of strong movements towards completed 
life, inspired by vigorous and transcendent person- 
alities ; thwarted by the common indolence and tend- 
ency to mechanization, but perpetually renewed. 
We have no reason to suppose that this history is 
a closed book, or that the spiritual life strug- 
gling to emerge among ourselves will follow other 
laws. 

We desire then, if we can, to discover what it 
was that these transcendent personalities possessed. 
We may think, from the point at which we now 



50 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

stand, that they had some things which were false, 
or, at least, were misinterpreted by them. We can- 
not without insincerity make their view of the uni- 
verse our own. But, plainly, they also possessed 
truths and values which most of us have not: they 
obtained from their religion, whether we allow that 
it had as creed an absolute or a symbolic value, a 
power of living, a courage and clear vision, which 
we do not as a rule obtain. When we study the 
character and works of these men and women, ob- 
serving their nobility, their sweetness, their power 
of endurance, their outflowing love, we must, un- 
less we be utterly insensitive, perceive ourselves to 
be confronted by a quality of being which we do not 
possess. And when we are so fortunate as to meet 
one of them in the flesh, though his conduct is com- 
monly more normal than our own, we know then 
with Plotinus that the soul has another life. Yet 
many of us accept the same creedal forms, use the 
same liturgies, acknowledge the same scale of values 
and same moral law. But as something beyond 
what the ordinary man calls beauty rushes out to the 
great artist from the visible world, and he at this 
encounter becomes more vividly alive; so for these 
there was and is in religion a new, intenser life 
which they can reach. They seem to represent 
favourable variations, genuine movements of man 
towards new levels; a type of life and of greatness, 
which remains among the hoarded possibilities of 
the race. 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 51 

Now the main questions which we have to ask of 
history fall Into two groups: 

First, Type. What are the characters which mark 
this life of the Spirit? 

Secondly, Process. What Is the line of develop- 
ment by which the Individual comes to acquire and 
exhibit these characters? 

First, then, the Spiritual Type. 

What we see above all In these men and women, 
so frequently repeated that we may regard It as 
classic, is a perpertual serious heroic effort to in- 
tegrate life about its highest factors. Their central 
quality and real source of power Is this single-mind- 
edness. They aim at God; the phrase Is Ruys- 
broeck's, but it pervades the real literature of the 
Spirit. Thus It Is the first principle of Hinduism 
that "the householder must keep touch with Brahma 
in all his actions.** ^ Thus the Sufi says he has 
but two laws — to look In one direction and to live in 
one way.^ Christians call this, and with reason, 
the Imitation of Christ; and it was in order to carry 
forward this Imitation more perfectly that all the 
great Christian systems of spiritual training were 
framed. The New Testament leaves us in no doubt 
that the central fact of Our Lord's life was His 
abiding sense of direct connection with and re- 
sponsibility to the Father; that His teaching and 
works of charity alike were Inspired by this union; 
and that He declared It, not as a unique fact, but 

1 "Autobiography of Maharishi Devendranath Tagore," Cap. 23. 

2 R. A. Nijcholson: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. i. 



52 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

as a possible human ideal. This is not a theological, 
but a historical statement, which applies in its de- 
gree to every man and woman who has been a 
follower of Christ: for He was, as St. Paul has 
said, *'the eldest in a vast family of brothers." 
The same single-minded effort and attainment meet 
us In other great faiths; though these may lack a 
historic Ideal of perfect holiness and love. And 
by a paradox repeated again and again in human 
history. It Is this utter devotion to the spiritual and 
eternal which is seen to bring forth the most abun- 
dant fruits In the temporal sphere; giving not only 
the strength to do difficult things, but that creative 
charity which "wins and redeems the unlovely by 
the power of Its love." ^ The man or woman of 
prayer, the community devoted to it, tap some 
deep source of power and use it In the most practical 
ways. Thus, the only object of the Benedictine rule 
was the fostering of goodness In those who adopted 
it, the education of the soul; and It became one of 
the chief instruments In the civilization of Europe, 
carrying forward not only religion, but education, 
pure scholarship, art, and industrial reform. The 
object of St. Bernard's reform was the restoration 
of the life of prayer. His monks, going out Into 
the waste places with no provision but their own 
faith, hope and charity, revived agriculture, estab- 
lished Industry, literally compelled the wilderness 
to flower for God. The Brothers of the Common 

1 Baron von Hiigel in the "Hibbert Journal," July, 1921. 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 53 

Life joined together, In order that, living simply 
and by their own industry, they might observe a 
rule of constant prayer: and they became In conse- 
quence a powerful educational Influence. The ob- 
ject of Wesley and his first companions was by dec- 
laration the saving of their own souls and the 
living only to the glory of God; but they were 
impelled at once by this to practical deeds of mercy, 
and ultimately became the regenerators of religion 
in the English-speaking world. 

It is well to emphasize this truth, for it conveys 
a lesson which we can learn from history at the 
present time with much profit to ourselves. It 
means that reconstruction of character and re- 
orientation of attention must precede reconstruction 
of society; that the Sufi is right when he declares 
that the whole secret lies in looking in one direction 
and living in one way. Again and again it has 
been proved, that those who aim at God do better 
work than those who start with the declared in- 
tention of benefiting their fellow-men. We must 
he good before we can do good; be real before we 
can accomplish real things. No generalized benev- 
olence, no social Christianity, however beautiful 
and devoted, can take the place of this centring of 
the spirit on eternal values; this humble, deliberate 
recourse to Reality. To suppose that it can do 
so, is to fly in the face of history and mistake effect 
for cause. 

This brings us to the Second Character: the rich 



54 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

completeness of the spiritual life, the way in which 
it fuses and transfigures the complementary human 
tendencies to contemplation and action, the non- 
successive and successive aspects of reality. "The 
love of God," said Ruysbroeck, "is an indrawing atid 
outpouring tide";^ and history endorses this. In 
its greatest representatives, the rhythm of adora- 
tion and work is seen in an accentuated form. 
These people seldom or never answer to the popular 
idea of idle contemplatives. They do not with- 
draw from the stream of natural life and effort, 
but plunge into it more deeply, seek its heart. 
They have powers of expression and creation, and 
use them to the full. St. Paul, St. Benedict, St 
Bernard, St. Francis, St. Teresa, St. Ignatius organ- 
izing families which shall incarnate the gift of new 
life; Fox, Wesley and Booth striving to save other 
men; Mary Slessor driven by vocation from the 
Dundee mill to the African swamps — these are char- 
acteristic of them. We perceive that they are not 
mere specialists, as more earthly types of efficiency 
are apt to be. Theirs are rich natures, their touch 
on existence has often an artistic quality. St. Paul 
in his correspondence could break into poetry, as the 
only way of telling the truth. St. Jerome lived to 
the full the lives of scholar and of ascetic. St. Fran- 
cis, in his perpetual missionary activities, still found 
time for his music and songs; St. Hildegarde and 
St. Catherine of Siena had their strong political 

1 Ruysbroeck; "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. lo. 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 55 

interests; Jacopone da Todi combined the careers 
of contemplative politician and poet. So too in 
practical matters. St. Catherine of Genoa was one 
of the first hospital administrators, St. Vincent de 
Paul a genius in the sphere of organized charity, 
Elizabeth Fry In that of prison reform. Brother 
Laurence assures us that he did his cooking the better 
for doing It in the Presence of God. Jacob Boehme 
was a hard-working cobbler, and afterwards as 
a writer showed amazing powers of composition. 
The perpetual journeylngs and activities of Wesley 
reproduced in smaller compass the career of St. 
Paul: he was also an exact scholar and a practical 
educationist. Mary Slessor showed the quality of 
a ruler as well as that of a winner of souls. In 
the intellectual region, Richard of St. Victor was 
supreme in contemplation, and also a psychologist 
far In advance of his time. We are apt to forget 
the mystical side of Aquinas; who was poet and con- 
templative as well as scholastic philosopher. 

And the third feature we notice about these men 
and women is, that this new power by which they 
lived was, as Ruysbroeck calls it, *'a spreading 
light." ^ It poured out of them, Invading and 
illuminating other men : so that, through them, whole 
groups or societies were re-born, if only for a time, 
on to fresh levels of reality, goodness and power. 
Their own intense personal experience was valid 
not only for themselves. They belonged to that 

^Ruysbroeck: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk. 
II, Cap. 39. 



56 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

class of natural leaders who are capable of Infect- 
ing the herd with their own ideals; leading it to 
new feeding grounds, Improving the common level. 
It Is indeed the main social function of the man or 
woman of the Spirit to be such a crowd-compeller 
in the highest sense; and, as the artist reveals new 
beauty to his fellow-men, to stimulate in their neigh- 
bours the latent human capacity for God. In every 
great surge forward to new life, we can trace back 
the radiance to such a single point of light; the 
transfiguration of an individual soul. Thus Christ's 
communion with His Father was the life-centre, the 
point of contact with Eternity, whence radiated the 
joy and power of the primitive Christian flock: the 
classic example of a corporate spiritual life. When 
the young man with great possessions asked Jesus, 
"What shall I do to be saved?" Jesus replied In 
effect, "Put aside all lesser Interests, strip off unreal- 
ities, and come, give yourself the chance of catching 
the Infection of holiness from Me." Whatever be 
our view of Christian dogma, whatever meaning we 
attach to the words ''redemption" and "atonement," 
we shall hardly deny that in the life and character 
of the historic Christ something new was thus 
evoked from, and added to, humanity. No one 
can read with attention the Gospel and the story of 
the primitive Church, without being struck by the 
consciousness of renovation, of enhancement, ex- 
perienced by all who received the Christian secret 
in its charismatic stage. This new factor is some- 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 57 

times called re-birth, sometimes grace, sometimes 
the power of the Splrif, sometimes being "In Christ." 
We misread history If we regard It either as a mere 
gust of emotional fervour, or a theological Idea, or 
discount the "miracles of healing" and other proofs 
of enhanced power by which It was expressed. 
Everything goes to prove that the "more abundant 
life" offered by the Johannlne Christ to His fol- 
lowers, was literally experienced by them; and was 
the source of their joy, their enthusiasm, their mu- 
tual love and power of endurance. 

On lower levels, and through the Inspiration of 
lesser teachers, history shows us the phenomena of 
primitive Christianity repeated again and again; 
both within and without the Christian circle of 
Ideas. Every religion looks for, and most have 
possessed, some revealer of the Spirit; some 
Prophet, Buddha, Mahdi, or Messiah. In all, the 
characteristic demonstrations of the human power of 
transcendence — a supernatural life which can be 
lived by us — have begun In one person, who has 
become a creative centre mediating new life to his 
fellow-men: as were Buddha and Mohammed for 
the faiths which they founded. Such lives as those 
of St. Paul, St. Benedict, St. Francis, Fox, Wesley, 
Booth are outstanding examples of the operation of 
this law. The parable of the leaven Is in fact an 
exact description of the way In which the spiritual 
consciousness — the supernatural urge — is observed 
to spread In human society. It Is characteristic of 



58 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

the regenerate type, that he should as It were over- 
flow his own boundaries and energize other souls: 
for the gift of a real and harmonized life pours 
out inevitably from those who possess it to other 
men. We notice that the great mystics recognize 
again and again such a fertilizing and creative 
power, as a mark, of the soul's full vitality. It is 
not the personal rapture of the spiritual marriage, 
but rather the "divine fecundity" of one who Is a 
parent of spiritual children ; which seems to them the 
goal of human transcendence, and evidence of a life 
truly lived on eternal levels, in real union with God. 
"In the fourth and last degree of love the soul 
brings forth Its children," says Richard of St. 
Victor. ^ "The last perfection to supervene upon 
a thing," says Aquinas, "Is its becoming the cause 
of other things." ^ In a word. It Is creative. And 
the spiritual life as we see It in history is thus crea- 
tive; the cause of other things. 

History is full of examples of this law: that the 
man or woman of the spirit Is, fundamentally, a 
life-giver; and all corporate achievement of the life 
of the spirit flows from some great apostle or Ini- 
tiator, Is the fruit of discipleship. Such corporate 
achievement is a form of group consciousness, 
brought into being through the power and attraction 
of a fully harmonized life. Infecting others with Its 
own sharp sense of Divine reality. Poets and artists 

1 R. of St. Victor: "De Quatuor Gradlbus Violentae Charitatis" 
(Migne, Pat. Lat.) T. 196, Col. 1216. 

2 •'Suraraa Contra Gentiles," Bk. Ill, Cap. 21. 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 59 

thus infect In a measure all those who yield to their 
influence. The active mystic, who is the poet of 
Eternal Life, does It In a supreme degree. Such 
a relation of master and disciples Is conspicuous in 
every true spiritual revival; and Is the link between 
the personal and corporate aspects of regeneration. 
We see It In the little flock that followed Christ, the 
Little Poor Men who followed Francis, the Friends 
of Fox, the army of General Booth. Not Christi- 
anity alone, but Hindu and Moslem history testify 
to this necessity. The Hindu who Is drawn to the 
spiritual life must find a guru who can not only teach 
Its laws but also give Its atmosphere; and must 
accept his discipline In a spirit of obedience. The 
Sufi neophyte Is directed to place himself In the 
hands of his sheikh "as a corpse In the hands of the 
washer" ; and all the great saints of Islam have been 
the inspiring centres of more or less organized 
groups. 

History teaches us, in fact, that God most often 
educates men through men. We most easily rec- 
ognize Spirit when It Is perceived transfiguring hu- 
man character, and most easily achieve it by means 
of sympathetic contagion. Though the new light 
may flash, as It seems, directly into the soul of the 
specially gifted or the inspired, this spontaneous out- 
breaking of novelty is comparatively rare; and even 
here, careful analysis will generally reveal the ex- 
tent In which environment, tradition, teaching liter- 
ary or oral, have prepared the way for It. There 



60 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

is no aptitude so great that it can afford to dispense 
with human experience and education. Even the 
noblest of the sons and daughters of God arc also 
the sons and daughters of the race; and are helped 
by those who go before them. And as regards the 
generality, not isolated effort but the love and 
sincerity of the true spiritual teacher — and every 
man and woman of the Spirit is such a teacher within 
his own sphere of influence — the unselfconscious 
trust of the disciple, are the means by which the 
secret of full life has been handed on. "One loving 
spirit," said St. Augustine, "sets another on fire"; 
and expressed in this phrase the law which governs 
the spiritual history of man. This law finds notable 
expression in the phenomena of the Religious Order; 
a type of association, found in more or less per- 
fection in every great religion, which has not re- 
ceived the attention it deserves from students of 
psychology. If we study the lives of those who 
founded these Orders — though such a foundation 
was not always intended by them — we notice one 
general characteristic: each was an enthusiast, 
abounding in zest and hope, and became in his life- 
time a fount of regeneration, a source of spiritual 
infection, for those who came under his influence. 
In each the spiritual world was seen "through a 
temperament," and so mediated to the disciples; 
who shared so far as they were able the master's 
special secret and attitude to life. Thus St. Bene- 
dict's sane and generous outlook is crystallized in 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 61 

the Benedictine rule. St. Francis' deep sense of the 
connection between poverty and freedom gave 
Franciscan regeneration its peculiar character 
The heroisms of the early Jesuit missionaries re 
fleeted the strong courageous temper of St. Ignatius 
The rich contemplative life of Carmel is a direct in 
heritance from St. Teresa's mystical experience 
The great Orders in their purity were families, in 
heriting and reproducing the salient qualities of their 
patriarch; who gave, as a father to his children, life 
stamped with his own characteristics. 

Yet sooner or later after the withdrawal of Its 
founder, the group appears to lose its spontaneous 
and enthusiastic character. Zest fails. Unless a 
fresh leader be forthcoming, it inevitably settles 
down again towards the general level of the herd. 
Thence it can only be roused by means of "reforms'* 
or "revivals," the arrival of new, vigorous leaders, 
and the formation of new enthusiastic groups : for 
the bulk of men as we know them cannot or will not 
make the costing effort needed for a first-hand par- 
ticipation In eternal life. They want a "crowd-com- 
peller" to lift them above themselves. Thus the 
history of Christianity is the history of successive 
spiritual group-formations, and their struggle to 
survive; from the time when Jesus of Nazareth 
formed His little flock with the avowed aim of 
"bringing in the Kingdom of God" — transmuting the 
mentality of the race, and so giving it more abun- 
dant life. 



62 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Christians appeal to the continued teaching and 
compelling power of their Master, the influence and 
infection of His spirit and atmosphere, as the great- 
est of the regenerative forces still at work within 
life: and this Is undoubtedly true of those devout 
spirits able to maintain contact with the eternal 
world In prayer. The great speech of Serenus de 
Cressy In "John Inglesant" described once for all 
the highest type of Christian spirituality.^ But in 
practice this link and this influence are too subtle for 
the mass of men. They must constantly be re- 
experienced by ardent and consecrated souls; and 
by them be mediated to fresh groups, formed within 
or without the institutional frame. Thus In the 
thirteenth century St. Francis, and in the fourteenth 
the Friends of God, created a true spiritual society 
within the Church, by restoring in themselves and 
their followers the lost consistency between Christian 
idea and Christian life. In the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries. Fox and Wesley possessed by 
the same essential vision, broke away from the 
institution which was no longer supple enough to 
meet their needs, and formed their fresh groups 
outside the old herd. 

When such creative personalities appear and such 
groups are founded by them, the phenomena of the 
spiritual life reappear In their full vigour, and are 
disseminated. A new vitality, a fresh power of 
endurance, is seen in all who are drawn within the 

ij. E. Shorthouse: "John Inglesant," Cap. 19. 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 63 

group and share Its mind. This Is what St. Paul 
seems to have meant, when he reminded his con- 
verts that they had the mind of Christ. The primi- 
tive friars, living under the Influence of Francis, did 
practice the perfect poverty which Is also perfect 
joy. The assured calm and willing sufferings of the 
early Christians were reproduced in the early 
Quakers, secure In their possession of the inner 
light. We know very well the essential characters 
of this fresh mentality; the power, the enthusiasm, 
the radiant joy, the indifference to pain and hard- 
ship it confers. But we can no more produce it 
from these raw materials than the chemist's crucible 
can produce life. The whole expeHence of St. 
Francis is implied in the Beatitudes. The secret 
of Elizabeth Fry is the secret of St. John. The 
doctrine of General Booth is fully stated by St. 
Paul. But it was not by referring Inquirers to the 
pages of the New Testament that the first brought 
men fettered by things to experience the freedom of 
poverty; the second faced and tamed three hundred 
Newgate criminals, who seemed at her first visit 
"like wild beasts"; or the third created armies of 
the redeemed from the dregs of the London Slums. 
They did these things by direct personal contagion; 
and they will be done among us again when the 
triumphant power of Eternal Spirit is again exhib- 
ited, not in ideas but in human character. 

I think, then, that history justifies us In regarding 
the full living of the spiritual life as Implying at 



64 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

least these three characters. First, single-mlnded- 
ness: to mean only God. Second, the full integra- 
tion of the contemplative and active sides of exis- 
tence, lifted up, harmonized, and completely conse- 
crated to those interests which the self recognizes 
as Divine. Third, the power of reproducing this 
life; incorporating it in a group. Before we go on, 
we will look at one concrete example which illus- 
trates all these points. This example is that of St. 
Benedict and the Order which he founded; for in 
the rounded completeness of his life and system we 
see what should be the normal life of the Spirit, 
and its result. 

Benedict was born in times not unlike our own, 
when wars had shaken civilization, the arts of peace 
were unsettled, religion was at a low ebb. As a 
young man, he experienced an intense revulsion from 
the vicious futility of Roman society, fled into the 
hills, and lived in a cave for three years alone with 
his thoughts of God. It would be easy to regard 
him as an eccentric boy : but he was adjusting himself 
to the real centre of his life. Gradually others 
who longed for a more real existence joined him, 
and he divided them into groups of twelve, and set- 
tled them in small houses; giving them a time-table 
by which to live, which should make possible a full 
and balanced existence of body, mind and soul. 
Thanks to those years of retreat and preparation, 
he knew what he wanted and what he ought to do; 
and they ushered in a long life of intense 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 65 

mental and spiritual activity. His houses were 
schools, which taught the service of God and the 
perfecting of the soul as the aims of life. His 
rule, in which genial human tolerance, gentle cour- 
tesy, and a profound understanding of men are not 
less marked than lofty spirituality, is the classic state- 
ment of all that the Christian spiritual life Implies 
and should be.^ 

What, then, is the character of the life which St. 
Benedict proposed as a remedy for the human 
failure and disharmony that he saw around him? 
It was framed, of course, for a celibate community: 
but It has many permanent features which are 
unaffected by his limitation. It offers balanced 
opportunities of development to the body, the mind 
and the spirit; laying equal emphasis on hard work, 
study, and prayer. It aims at a robust complete- 
ness, not at the production of professional ascetics; 
indeed. Its Rule says little about physical austeri- 
ties, insists on sufficient food and rest, and counte- 
nances no extremes. According to Abbot Butler, St. 
Benedict's day was divided Into three and a half 
hours for public worship, four and a half for read- 
ing and meditation, six and a half for manual work, 
eight and a half for sleep, and one hour for meals. 
So that in spite of the time devoted to spiritual and 
mental Interests, the primitive Benedictine did a 
good day's work and had a good night's rest at the 

iCf. Delatte: "The Rule of St. Benedict"; and C. Butler: 
"Benedictine Monachism." 



66 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

end of it. The work might be anything that 
wanted doing, so long as the hours of prayer were 
not infringed. Agriculture, scholarship, education, 
handicrafts and art have all been done perfectly by 
St. Benedict's sons, working and willing in quiet 
love. This is what one of the greatest constructive 
minds of Christendom regarded as a reasonable 
way of life; a frame within which the loftiest human 
faculties could grow, and man's spirit achieve that 
harmony with God which is its goal. Moreover, 
this life was to be social. It was in the beginning 
just the busy useful life of an Italian farm, lived in 
groups — in monastic families, under the rule and 
inspiration not of a Master but of an Abbot; a 
Father who really was the spiritual parent of his 
monks, and sought to train them in the humility, obe- 
dience, self-denial and gentle suppleness of character 
which are the authentic fruits of the Spirit. This 
ideal, it seems to me, has something still to say to us; 
some reproof to administer to our hurried and 
muddled existence, our confusion of values, our 
failure to find time for reality. We shall find in it 
and its creator, if we look, all those marks of the 
regenerate life of the Spirit which history has shown 
to us as normal: namely the transcendent aim, the 
balanced career of action and contemplation, the 
creative power, and above all the principle of 
social solidarity and discipleship. 

We go on to ask history what it has to tell us on 
the second point, the process by which the individual 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 67 

normally develops this life of the Spirit, the serial 
changes it demands; for plainly, to know this is 
of practical importance to us. The full inwardness 
of these changes will be considered when we come 
to the personal aspect of the spiritual life. Now 
we are only concerned to notice that history tends to 
establish the constant recurrence of a normal proc- 
ess, recognizable alike In great and small person- 
alities under the various labels which have been 
given to It, by which the self moves from Its usually 
exclusive correspondence with the temporal order 
to those full correspondences with reality, that union 
with God, characteristic of the spiritual life. This 
life we must believe In some form and degree to be 
possible for all; but we study it best on heroic levels, 
for here Its moments are best marked and its fullest 
records survive. 

The first moment of this process seems to be, that 
man falls out of love with life as he has commonly 
lived it, and the world as he has known it. Dis- 
satisfaction and disillusion possess him; the negative 
marks of his nascent Intuition of another life, for 
which he Is Intended but which he has not yet found. 
We see this Initial phase very well In St. Benedict, 
disgusted by the meaningless life of Roman society; 
In St. Francis, abandoning his gay and successful 
social existence; In Richard Rolle, turning suddenly 
from scholarship to a hermit's life; In the restless 
misery of St. Catherine of Genoa; In Fox, des- 
perately seeking ^'something that could speak to 



68 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

his condition"; and also in two outstanding ex- 
amples from modern India, those of the Maharishi 
Devendranath Tagore and the Sadhu Sundar Singh. 
This dissatisfaction, sometimes associated with the 
negative vision or conviction of sin, sometimes with 
the positive longing for holiness and peace, is the 
mental preparation of conversion; which, though 
not a constant, is at least a characteristic feature of 
the beginning of the spiritual life as seen in history. 
We might, indeed, expect some crucial change of 
attitude, some inner crisis, to mark the beginning of 
a new life which is to aim only at God. Here too 
we find one motive of that movement of world- 
abandonment which so commonly follows conver- 
sion, especially in heroic souls. Thus St. Paul hides 
himself in Arabia; St. Benedict retires for three 
years to the cave at Subiaco; St. Ignatius to Man- 
resa. Gerard Groot, the brilliant and wealthy 
young Dutchman who founded the brotherhood of 
the Common Life, began his new life by self- 
seclusion in a Carthusian cell. St. Catherine of 
Siena at first lived solitary in her own room. St. 
Francis with dramatic completeness abandoned his 
whole past, even the clothing that was part of it. 
Jacopone da Todi, the prosperous lawyer converted 
to Christ's poverty, resorted to the most grotesque 
devices to express his utter separation from the 
world. Others, it is true, have chosen quieter 
methods, and found in that which St. Catherine calls 
the cell of self-knowledge the solitude they re- 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 69 

quired; but some decisive break was Imperative for 
all. History assures us that there Is no easy sliding 
Into the life of the Spirit. 

A secondary cause of such world refusal Is the 
first awakening of the contemplative powers; the in- 
tuition of Eternity, hitherto dormant, and felt at 
this stage to be — In Its overwhelming reality and 
appeal — In conflict with the unreal world and un- 
sublimated active life. This is the controlling Idea 
of the hermit and recluse. It Is well seen In St. 
Teresa ; whom her biographers describe as torn, for 
years, between the Interests of human Intercourse 
and the imperative inner voice urging her to solitary 
self-discipline and prayer. So we may say that In 
the beginning of the life of the Spirit, as history 
shows it to us, if disillusion marks the first moment, 
some measure of asceticism, of world-refusal and 
painful self-schooling. Is likely to mark the second 
moment. 

What we are watching Is the complete recon- 
struction of personality; a personality that has 
generally grown into the wrong shape. This Is 
likely to be a hard and painful business; and indeed 
history assures us that It is, and further that the 
spiritual life Is never achieved by taking the line of 
least resistance and basking in the divine light. 
With world-refusal, then, is Intimately connected 
stern moral conflict; often lasting for years, and 
having as Its object the conquest of selfhood In all 
Its Insidious forms. "Take one step out of your- 



70 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

self," say the Sufis, "and you will arrive at God." ^ 
This one step Is the most difficult act of life; yet 
urged by love, man has taken It again and again. 
This phase is so familiar to every reader of spiritual 
biography, that I need not Insist upon it. "In the 
field of this body," says Kablr, "a great war goes 
forward, against passion, anger, pride and greed. 
It is in the Kingdom of Truth, Contentment and 
Purity that this battle is raging, and the sword that 
rings forth most loudly is the sword of His 
Name." - "Man," says Boehme, "must here be ar 
war with himself if he wishes to be a heavenly citi- 
zen . . . fighting must be the watchword, not with 
tongue and sword, but with mind and spirit; and not 
to give over." ^ The need of such a conflict, shown 
to us in history, is explained on human levels by psy- 
chology. On spiritual levels it is made plain to all 
whose hearts are touched by the love of God. By 
this way all must pass who achieve the life of the 
Spirit; subduing to its purposes their wayward wills, 
and sublimating In Its power their conflicting an- 
imal impulses. This long effort brings as its re- 
ward a unification of character, an inflow of power: 
from it we see the mature man or woman of the 
Spirit emerge. In St. Catherine of Genoa this con- 
flict lasted for four years, after which the thought of 
sin ceased to rule her consciousness.^ St. Teresa's 

1 R. A. NichoNon: "Studies in Islamic Mysticism," Cap. i. 

2 "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 44. 
^Boehme: "Six Thcosophic Points," p. iii. 

4 Cf. Von Hiigel: "The Mystical Element of Religion," Vol. 
I, Pt. II. 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 71 

intermittent struggles are said to have continued for 
thirty years. John Wesley, always deeply reli- 
gious, did not attain the Inner stability he calls 
assurance till he was thirty-five years old. Blake 
was for twenty years In mental conflict, shut off 
from the sources of his spiritual life. So slowly do 
great personalities come to their full stature, and 
subdue their vigorous Impulses to the one ruling 
Idea. 

The ending of this conflict, the self's unification 
and establishment In the new life, commonly means 
a return more or less complete to that world from 
which the convert had retreated; taking up of the 
fully energized and fully consecrated human ex- 
istence, which must express Itself In work no less 
than In prayer; an exhibition too of the capacity for 
leadership which is the mark of the regenerate 
mind. Thus the ''first return" of the Buddhist 
saint is ''from the absolute world to the world of 
phenomena to save all sentient beings." ^ Thus St. 
Benedict's and St. Catherine of Siena's three soli- 
tary years are the preparation for their great and 
active life works. St. Catherine of Genoa, first a 
disappointed and world-weary woman and then a 
penitent, emerges as a busy and devoted hospital 
matron and inspired teacher of a group of disciples. 
St. Teresa's long Interior struggles precede her 
vigorous career as founder and reformer; her 
creation of spiritual families, new centres of con- 

iMcGovern: "An Introduction to Mahayana Buddhism," p. 175. 



72 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

templatlve life. The vast activities of Fox and 
Wesley were the fruits first of Inner conflict, then of 
assurance — the experience of God and of the self's 
relation to Him. And on the highest levels of the 
spiritual life as history shows them to us, this ex- 
perience and realization, first of profound harmony 
with Eternity and its Interests, next of a personal 
relation of love, last of an Indwelling creative 
power, a givenness, an energizing grace, reaches 
that completeness to which has been given the name 
of union with God. 

The great man or woman of the Spirit who 
achieves this perfect development Is, it is true, a 
special product: a genius, comparable with great 
creative personalities in other walks of life. But he 
neither invalidates the smaller talent nor the more 
general tendency in which his supreme gift takes Its 
rise. Where he appears, that tendency Is vigorously 
stimulated. Tike other artists, he founds a school; 
the spiritual life flames up, and spreads to those 
within his circle of Influence. Through him, ordi- 
nary men, whose aptitude for God might have re- 
mained latent, obtain a fresh start; an impetus to 
growth. There Is a sense in which he might say 
with the Johannlne Christ, "He that receiveth me 
receiveth Him that sent me"; for yielding to his 
magnetism, men really yield to the drawing of the 
Spirit Itself. And when they do this, their lives are 
found to reproduce — though with less Intensity — 
the life history of their leader. Therefore the 



HISTORY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 73 

main characters of that life history, that steady un- 
divided process of sublimation; are normal human 
characters. We too may heal the discords of our 
moral nature, learn to judge existence in the univer- 
sal light, bring into consciousness our latent tran- 
scendental sense, and keep ourselves so spiritually 
supple that alike in times of stress and hours of 
prayer and silence we are aware of the mysterious 
and energizing contact of God. Psychology sug- 
gests to us that the great spiritual personalities re- 
vealed in history are but supreme instances of a 
searching self-adjustment and of a way of life, al- 
ways accessible to love and courage, which all men 
may in some sense undertake. 



CHAPTER III 

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

(I) The Analysis of Mind 

Having interrogated history in our attempt to 
discover the essential character of the life of the 
Spirit, wherever it is found, we are now to see what 
psychology has to tell us or hint to us of its nature; 
and of the relation in which it stands to the 
mechanism of our psychic life. It is hardly 
necessary to say that such an inquiry, fully carried 
out, would be a life-work. Moreover, it is an in- 
quiry which we are not yet in a position to under- 
take. True, more and more material is daily be- 
coming available for it: but many of the principles 
involved are, even yet, obscure. Therefore any 
conclusions at which we may arrive can only be ten- 
tative; and the theories and schematic representa- 
tions that we shall be obliged to use must be re- 
garded as mere working diagrams — almost cer- 
tainly of a temporary character — but useful to us, 
because they do give us an interpretation of inner ex- 
perience with which we can deal. I need not 
emphasize the extent in which modern develop- 
ments of psychology are affecting our conceptions of 

74 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 75 

the spiritual life, and our reading of many religious 
phenomena on which our ancestors looked with awe. 
When we have eliminated the more heady exagger- 
ations of the psycho-analysts, and the too-violent 
simplifications of the behaviourists, it remains true 
that many problems have lately been elucidated in 
an unexpected, and some in a helpful, sense. We 
are learning In particular to see In true proportion 
those abnormal states of trance and ecstasy which 
were once regarded as the essentials, but are now 
recognized as the by-products, of the mystical life. 
But a good deal that at first sight seems startling, 
and even disturbing to the religious mind, turns out 
on investigation to be no more than the relabelling 
of old facts, which behind their new tickets remain 
unchanged. Perhaps no generation has ever been 
so much at the mercy of such labels as our own. 
Thus many people who are inclined to jibe at the 
doctrine of original sin welcome It with open arms 
when It Is reintroduced as the uprush of primitive 
Instinct. Opportunity of confession to a psycho- 
analyst Is eagerly sought and gladly paid for, by 
troubled spirits who would never resort for the 
same purpose to a priest. The formulae of auto- 
suggestion are freely used by those who repudiate 
vocal prayer and acts of faith with scorn. If, then, 
I use for the purpose of exposition some of those 
labels which are affected by the newest schools, I do 
so without any suggestion that they represent the 
only valid way of dealing with the psychic life of 



76 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

man. Indeed, I regard these labels as little more 
than exceedingly clever guesses at truth. But since 
they are now generally current and often suggestive, 
it is well that we should try to find a place for 
spiritual experience within the system which they 
represent; thus carrying through the principle on 
which we are working, that of interpreting the 
abiding facts of the spiritual life, so far as we can, in 
the language of the present day. 

First, then, I propose to consider the analysis of 
mind, and what it has to tell us a"bout the nature of 
Sin, of Salvation, of Conversion; what light it 
casts on the process of purgation or self-purification 
which is demanded by all religions of the Spirit; 
what are the respective parts played by reason and 
instinct in the process of regeneration; and the 
importance for religious experience of the phenom- 
ena of apperception. 

We need not at this point consider again all that 
we mean by the life of the Spirit. We have 
already considered it as it appears in history — its 
inexhaustible variety, its power, nobility, and grace. 
We need only to remind ourselves that what we have 
got to find room for in our psychological scheme is 
literally, a changed and enhanced life; a life which, 
immersed in the stream of history, is yet poised on 
the eternal world. This life involves a complete 
re-direction of our desires and impulses, a trans- 
figuration of character; and often, too, a sense of 
subjugation to superior guidance, of an access of 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 77 

impersonal strength, so overwhelming as to give 
many of its activities an inspirational or automatic 
character. We found that this life was marked by 
a rhythmic alternation between receptivity and 
activity, more complete and purposeful than the 
rhythm of work and rest which conditions, or should 
condition, the healthy life of sense. This re-direc- 
tion and transfiguration, this removal to a higher 
term of our mental rhythm, are of course psychic 
phenomena ; using this word in a broad sense, with- 
out prejudice to the discrimination^ of any one aspect 
of it as spiritual. All that we mean at the moment 
is, that the change which brings in the spiritual life is 
a change in the mind and heart of man, working in 
the stuff of our common human nature, and involving 
all that the modern psychologist means by the word 
psyche. 

We begin therefore with the nature of the psyche 
as this modern, growing, changing psychology 
conceives it; for this is the raw material of regen- 
erate man. If we exclude those merely degraded 
and pathological theories which have resulted from 
too exclusive a study of degenerate minds, we find 
that the current conception of the psyche — ^by which 
of course I do not mean the classic conceptions of 
Ward or even William James — was anticipated by 
Plotinus, when he said in the Fourth Enncad, that 
every soul has something of the lower life for the 
purposes of the body and of the higher for the 
purposes of the Spirit, and yet constitutes a unity; 



78 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

an unbroken series of ascending values and powers 
of response, from the levels of merely physical and 
mainly unconscious life to those of the self-determin- 
ing and creative consciousness.^ We first discover 
psychic energy as undifferentiated directive power, 
controlling response and adaption to environment; 
and as it develops, ever increasing the complexity 
of its impulses and habits, yet never abandoning 
anything of its past. Instinct represents the corre- 
spondence of this life-force with mere nature, its 
effort as it were to keep its footing and accomplish 
its destiny in the world of time. Spirit represents 
this same life acting on highest levels, with most 
vivid purpose; seeking and achieving correspondence 
with the eternal world, and realities of the loftiest 
order yet discovered to be accessible to us. We are 
compelled to use words of this kind; and the pro- 
ceeding is harmless enough so long as we remember 
that they are abstractions, and that we have no real 
reason to suppose breaks in the life process which 
extends from the infant's first craving for food and 
shelter to the saint's craving for the knowledge of 
God. This urgent, craving life is the dominant 
characteristic of the psyche. Thought is but the 
last come and least developed of Its powers; one 
among its various responses to environment, and 
ways of laying hold on experience. 

This conception of the multiplicity in unity of the 
psyche, conscious and unconscious, is probably one 

lEnnead IV. 8. 5. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 79 

of the most important results of recent psychological 
advance. It means that we cannot any longer in 
the good old way rule off bits or aspects of it, and 
call them intellect, soul, spirit, conscience and so 
forth; or, on the other hand, refer to our *lower^* 
nature as if it were something separate from our- 
selves. I am spirit when I pray, if I pray rightly. 
I am my lower nature, when my thoughts and deeds 
are swayed by my primitive impulses and physical 
longings, declared or disguised. I am most wholly 
myself when that impulsive nature and that craving 
spirit are welded into one, subject to the same emo- 
tional stimulus, directed to one goal. When theolo- 
gians and psychologists, ignoring this unity of the 
self, set up arbitrary divisions — and both classes are 
very fond of doing so — they are merely making 
diagrams for their own convenience. We ourselves 
shall probably be compelled to do this : and the pro- 
ceeding is harmless enough, so long as we recollect 
that these diagrams are at best symbolic pictures of 
fact. Specially is it necessary to keep our heads, 
and refuse to be led away by the constant modern 
talk of the primitive, unconscious, foreconscious in- 
stinctive and other minds which are so prominent in 
modern psychological literature, or by the spatial 
suggestions of such terms as threshold, complex, 
channel of discharge : remembering always the cen- 
tral unity and non-material nature of that many- 
faced psychic life which is described under these 
various formulae. 



80 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

If we accept this central unity with all its implica- 
tions, it follows that we cannot take our superior 
and conscious faculties, set them apart, and call 
them "ourselves"; refusing responsibility for the 
more animal and less fortunate tendencies and in- 
stincts which surge up with such distressing ease and 
frequency from the deeps, by attributing these to 
nature or heredity. Indeed, more and more does it 
become plain that the sophisticated surface-mind 
which alone we usually recognize is the smallest, the 
least developed, and in some respects still the least 
important part of the real self: that whole man of 
impulse, thought and desire, which it is the business 
of religion to capture and domesticate for God. 
That whole man is an animal-spirit, a living, grow- 
ing, plastic unit; moving towards a racial future yet 
unperceived by us, and carrying with him a racial past 
which conditions at every moment his choices, im- 
pulses and acts. Only the most rigid self-examina- 
tion will disclose to us the extent in which the jungle 
and the Stone Age are still active in our games, our 
politics and our creeds; how many of our motives 
are still those of primitive man, and how many of 
our social institutions offer him a discreet opportu- 
nity of self-expression. 

Here, as it seems to me, is a point at which the old 
thoughts of religion and the new thoughts of psy- 
chology may unite and complete one another. 
Here the scientific conception of the psyche is 
merely restating the fundamental Christian par- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 81 

adox, that man Is truly one, a living, growing 
spirit, the creature and child of the Divine Life; 
and yet that there seem to be in him, as it were, two 
antagonistic natures — that duality which St. Paul 
calls the old Adam and the new Adam. The law 
of the flesh and the law of the spirit, the earthward- 
tending life of mere natural impulse and the quick- 
ening life of re-directed desire, the natural and the 
spiritual man, are conceptions which the new psy- 
chologist can hardly reject or despise. True, reli- 
gion and psychology may offer different rationaliza- 
tions of the facts. That which one calls original 
sin, the other calls the Instinctive mind : but the situ- 
ation each puts before us Is the same. *T find a 
law," says St. Paul, "that when I would do good 
evil is present with me. For I delight in the law of 
God after the inward man but I see another law In 
my members warring against the law of my 
mind. . . . With the mind I myself serve the law 
of God, but with the flesh the law of sin." With- 
out going so far as a distinguished psychoanalyst 
who said In my hearing, "If St. Paul had come to me, 
I feel I could have helped him," I think it Is clear 
that we are learning to give a new content to this, 
and many other sayings of the New Testament. 
More and more psychology tends to emphasize the 
Pauline distinction; demonstrating that the pro- 
found disharmony existing in most civilized men be- 
tween the Impulsive and the rational life, the many ^ 
conflicts which sap his energy, arise from the per- 



82 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

sistence within us of the archaic and primitive along- 
side the modern mind. It demonstrates that the 
many stages and constituents of our psycliic past are 
still active in each one of us; though often below the 
threshold of consciousness. The blindly instinctive 
life, with its almost exclusive interests in food, 
safety and reproduction; the law of the flesh in its 
simplest form, carried over from our pre-human 
ancestry and still capable of taking charge when we 
are off our guard. The more complex life of the 
human primitive; with its outlook of wonder, self- 
interest and fear, developed under conditions of 
Ignorance, peril and perpetual struggle for life. 
The history of primitive man covers millions of 
years: the history of civilized man, a few thousand 
at the most. Therefore it Is not surprising that the 
primitive outlook should have bitten hard into the 
plastic stuff of the developing psyche, and forms still 
the Infantile foundation of our mental life. Finally, 
there is the rational life, so far as the rational is 
yet achieved by us; correcting, conflicting with, and 
seeking to refine and control the vigour of primitive 
Impulse. 

But if it Is to give an account of all the facts 
psychology must also point out, and find place for, 
the last-comer In the evolutionary series: the rare 
and still rudimentary achievement of the spiritual 
consciousness, bearing witness that we are the chil- 
dren of God, and pointing, not backward to the roots 
but onward to the fruits of human growth. But It 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 83 

cannot allow us to think of this spiritual life as 
something separate from, and wholly unconditioned 
by, our racial past. We must rather conceive it as 
the crown of our psychic evolution, the end of that 
process which began in the dawn of consciousness 
and which St. Paul calls "growing up into the stature 
of Christ." Here psychology is in harmony with 
the teaching of those mystics who invite us to rec- 
ognize, not a completed spirit, but rather a seed 
within us. In the spiritual yearnings, the profound 
and yet uncertain stirrings of the religious con- 
sciousness, its half-understood impulses to God, we 
perceive the floating-up into the conscious field of 
this deep germinal life. And psychology warns us, 
I think, that In our efforts to forward the upgrowth 
of this spiritual life, we must take into account those 
earlier types of reaction to the universe which still 
continue underneath our bright modern appearance, 
and still inevitably condition and explain so many 
of our motives and our deeds. It warns us that 
the psychic growth of humanity is slow and uneven ; 
and that every one of us still retains, though not 
always it Is true in a recognizable form, many of 
the characters of those stages of development 
through which the race has passed — characters which 
inevitably give their colour to our religious no less 
than to our social life. 

"I desire," says a Kempis, *'to enjoy thee In- 
wardly but I cannot take thee. I desire to cleave 
to heavenly things but fleshly things and unmortified 



84 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

passions depress me. I will In my mind be above 
all things but In despite of myself I am constrained 
to be beneath, so I unhappy man fight with myself 
and am made grievous to myself while the spirit 
seeketh what is above and the flesh what is be- 
neath. O what I suffer within while I think on 
heavenly things in my mind; the company of fleshly 
things cometh against me when I pray." ^ 

"Oh Master," says the Scholar in Boehme's great 
dialogue, "the creatures that live in me so withhold 
me, that I cannot wholly yield and give myself up 
as I willingly would." ^ 

No psychologist has come nearer to a statement 
of the human situation than have these old specialists 
in the spiritual life. 

The bearing of all this on the study of organized 
religion is of course of great importance; and will 
be discussed in a subsequent section. All that I 
wish to point out now is that the beliefs, and the 
explanations of action, put forward by our rational- 
izing surface consciousness are often mere veils 
which drape the crudeness of our real desires and 
reactions to life; and that before life can be re- 
integrated about its highest centres, these real be- 
liefs and motives must be tracked down, and their 
humiliating character acknowledged. The ape and 
the tiger, in fact, are not dead in any one of us. 
In polite persons they are caged, which is a very 

iDe Imit. Christi, BL III, Cap. 53- 
2 Boehme, "The Way to Christ," Pt- IV. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 85 

different thing: and a careful Introspection will teach 
us to recognize their snarls and chatterlngs, their 
urgent requests for more mutton chops or bananas, 
under the many disguises which they assume — dis- 
guises which are not infrequently borrowed from 
ethics or from religion. Thus a primitive desire 
for revenge often masquerades as justice, and an 
unedifying Interest In personal safety can be dis- 
cerned In at least some Interpretations of atone- 
ment, and some aspirations towards Immortality. * 
I now go on to a second point. It will already be 
clear that the modern conception of the many-lev- 
elled psyche gives us a fresh standpoint from which 
to consider the nature of Sin. It suggests to us, 
that the essence of much sin is conservatism, or 
atavism: that it Is rooted in the tendency of the in- 
stinctive life to go on, in changed circumstances, 
acting in the same old way. Virtue, perfect right- 
ness of correspondence with our present surround- 
ings, perfect consistency of our deeds with our best 
ideas, is hard work. It means the sublimation of 
crude instinct, the steady control of impulse by such 
reason as we possess; and perpetually forces us to 
use on new and higher levels that machinery of 
habit-formation, that power of implanting tendencies 
in the plastic psyche, to which man owes his earthly 
dominance. When our unstable psychic life relaxes 

^ Unamuso has not hesitated to base the whole of religion on the 
instinct of self-preservation: but this must I think be regarded as 
an exaggerated view. See "The Tragic Sense of Life in Men 
and in Peoples," Caps. 3 and 4. 



86 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

tension and sinks to lower lev^els than this, and it 
is always tending so to do, we are relapsing to 
antique methods of response, suitable to an environ- 
ment which is no longer there. Few people go 
through life without knowing w'hat it is to feel a 
sudden, even murderous, impulse to destroy the ob- 
stacle in their path; or seize, at all costs, that which 
they desire. Our ancestors called these uprushes 
the solicitations of the devil, seeking to destroy the 
Christian soul; and regarded them with justice as an 
opportunity of testing our spiritual strength. It is 
true that every man has within him such a tempting 
spirit; but its characters can better be studied in the 
Zoological Gardens than in the con\^olutions of a 
theological hell. "External Reason," says Boehme, 
"supposes that hell is far from us. But it is near 
us. Every one carries it in himself." ^ Many of 
our vices, in fact, are simply savage qualities — and 
some are even savage virtues — in their old age. 
Thus in an organized society the acquisitiveness and 
self-assertion proper to a vigorous primitive depen- 
dent on his own powers survive as the sins of envy 
and covetousness, and are seen operating in the 
dishonesty of the burglar, the greed and egotism 
of the profiteer: and, on the highest levels, the 
great spiritual sin of pride may be traced back to 
a perverted expression of that self-regarding instinct 
without which the individual could hardly survive. 
When therefore qualities which were once use- 

ifioehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 98. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 87 

ful on their own level are outgrown but unsubll- 
mated, and check the movement towards life's spiri- 
tualization, then — whatever they may be — they be- 
long to the body of death, not to the body of life, 
and are *'sin." "Call sin a lump — none other 
thing than thyself," says *'The Cloud of Unknow- 
ing." ^ Capitulation to it is often brought about 
by mere slackness, or, as religion would say, by 
the mortal sin of sloth; which Julian of Norwich 
declares to be one of the two most deadly sick- 
nesses of the soul. Sometimes-, too, sin is deliber- 
ately indulged in because of the perverse satisfac- 
tion which this yielding to old craving gives us. The 
violent-tempered man becomes once more a primi- 
tive, when he yields to wrath. A starved and re- 
pressed side of his nature — the old Adam, in fact 
— leaps up into consciousness and glories in its 
strength. He obtains from the explosion an im- 
mense feeling of relief; and so too with the other 
great natural passions which our religious or social 
morality keeps in check. Even the saints have 
known these revenges of natural instincts too vi- 
olently denied. Thoughts of obscene words and 
gestures came unasked to torment the pure soul of 
Catherine of Siena. ^ St. Teresa complained that 
the devil sometimes sent her so offensive a spirit of 
bad temper that she could eat people up.^ Games 
and sport of a combative or destructive kind pro- 

i"The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 36. 

2E. Gardner: "St. Catherine of Siena," p. 20. 

3 ''Life of St. Teresa," by Herself, Cap. 30. 



88 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

vide an Innocent outlet for a certain amount of this 
unused ferocity; and Indeed the chief function of 
games In the modern state Is to help us avoid oc- 
casions of sin. The sinfulness of any deed depends, 
therefore, on this theory, on the extent In which It In- 
volves retrogression from the point we have 
achieved: failure to correspond with the light we 
possess. The inequality of the moral standard all 
over the world is a simple demonstration of this 
fact: for many a deed which is Innocent in New 
Guinea, would In London provoke the Immediate 
attention of the police. 

Does not this view of sin, as primarily a fall-back 
to past levels of conduct and experience, a defeat 
of the spirit of the future In Its conflict with the un- 
dying past, give us a fresh standpoint from which 
to look at the idea of Salvation? We know that 
all religions of the spirit have based their claim upon 
man on such an offer of salvation: on the conviction 
that there is somethuig from which he needs to be 
rescued, if he Is to achieve a satisfactory life. 
What Is It, then, from which he must be saved? 

I think that the answer must be, from conflict: 
the conflict between the pull-back of his racial origin 
and the pull-forward of his spiritual destiny, the 
antagonism between the buried Titan and the emerg- 
ing soul, each tending towards adaptation to a differ- 
ent order of reality. We may as well acknowledge 
that man as he stands Is mostly full of conflicts and 
resistances: that the trite verse about "fightings and 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 89 

fears within, without" does really describe the un- 
regenerate yet sensitive mind with its Ineffective 
struggles, Its inveterate egotism, Its Inconsistent 
impulses and loves. Man's young will and reason 
need some reinforcement, some helping power, if 
they are to conquer and control his archaic impulsive 
life. And this salvation, this extrication from the 
wrongful and atavistic claims of primitive Impulse In 
its many strange forms, Is a prime business of reli- 
gion; sometimes achieved In the sudden convulsion 
we call conversion, and sometimes by the slower 
process of education. The wrong way to do It is 
seen in the methods of the Puritan and the extreme 
ascetic, where all animal impulse Is regarded as "sin" 
and repressed : a proceeding which involves the risk 
of grave physical and mental disorder, and produces 
even at the best a bloodless pietism. The right way 
to do it was described once for all by Jacob Boehme, 
when he said that it was the business of a spiritual 
man to "harness his fiery energies to the service of 
the light — " that is to say, change the direction of 
our passionate cravings for satisfaction, harmonize 
and devote them to spiritual ends. This Is true 
regeneration: this Is the salvation offered to man, 
the healing of his psychic conflict by the unification 
of his Instinctive and his Ideal life. The voice 
which St. Mechthild heard, saying "Come and be 
reconciled," expresses the deepest need of civilized 
but unspirituallzed humanity. 

This need for the conversion or remaking of the 



90 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

instinctive life, rather than the achievement of mere 
beliefs, has always been appreciated by real spirit- 
ual teachers; Who are usually some generations in 
advance of the psychologists. Here they agree in 
finding the "root of evil," the heart of the "old 
man" and best promise of the "new." Here is 
the raw material both of vice and of virtue — 
namely, a mass of desires and cravings which are 
in themselves neither moral nor immoral, but nat- 
ural and self-regarding. "In will, imagination and 
desire," says William Law, "consists the life or fiery 
driving of every intelligent creature." ^ The Di- 
vine voice which said to Jacopone da Todi "Set love 
in order, thou that lovest Me!" declared the one law 
of mental growth.- To use for a moment the 
language of mystical theology, conversion, or re- 
pentance, the first step towards the spiritual life, 
consists in a change in the direction of these cravings 
and desires; purgation or purification, in which 
the work begun in conversion is made complete, in 
their steadfast setting in order or re-education, and 
that refinement and fixation of the most desirable 
among them which we call the formation of habit, 
and which is the essence of character building. It Is 
from this hard, conscious and deliberate work of 
adapting our psychic energy to new and higher cor- 
respondences, this costly moral effort and true self- 

1 "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p. 59. 

2 Jacopone da Todi, Lauda 90. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 91 

conquest, that the spiritual life In man draws Its ear- 
nestness, reality and worth. 

"Oh, Academlcus," says William Law, in terms 
that any psychologist would endorse, "forget your 
scholarship, give up your art and criticism, be a 
plain man; and then the first rudiments of sense 
may teach you that there, and there only, can good- 
ness be, where it comes forth as a birth of Life, 
and is the free natural work and fruit of that which 
lives within us. For till goodness thus comes from 
a Life within us, we have In truth none at all. For 
reason, with all Its doctrine, discipline, and rules, 
can only help us to be so good, so changed, and 
amended, as a wild beast may be, that by restraints 
and methods Is taught to put on a sort of tameness, 
though Its wild nature Is all the time only restrained, 
and In a readiness to break forth again as occasion 
shall offer." ^ Our business, then. Is not to restrain, 
but to put the wild beast to work, and use Its mighty 
energies; for thus only shall we find the power to 
perform hard acts. See the young Salvation Army 
convert turning over the lust for drink or sexual sat- 
isfaction to the lust to save his fellow-men. This 
transformation or sublimation Is not the work of 
reason. His instinctive life, the main source of 
conduct, has been directed Into a fresh channel of 
use. 

We may now look a little more closely at the char- 

1 "Liberal and Mystical Writings of William Law," p. 123. 



92 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

acter and potentialties of our instinctive life: for 
this life is plainly of the highest importance to us, 
since it will either energize or thwart all the efforts 
of the rational self. Current psychology, even more 
plainly than religion, encourages us to recognize in 
this powerful instinctive nature the real source of 
our conduct, the origin of all those dynamic personal 
demands, those impulses to action, which condition 
<he full and successful life of the natural man. In- 
stincts in the animal and the natural man are the 
methods by which the life force takes care of Its own 
interests, insures its own full development, its un- 
impeded forward drive. In so far as we form part 
of the animal kingdom our own safety, property, 
food, dominance, and the reproduction of our own 
type, are inevitably the first objects of our instinctive 
care. Civilized life has disguised some of these crude 
demands and the behaviour which is inspired by 
them, but their essential character remains un- 
changed. Love and hate, fear and wonder, self- 
assertion and self-abasement, the gregarious, the 
acquisitive, the constructive tendencies, are all ex- 
pressions of instinctive feeling; and can be traced 
back to our simplest animal needs. 

But instincts are not fixed tendencies: they are 
adaptable. This can be seen clearly in the case of 
animals whose environment is artificially changed. 
In the dog, for instance, loyalty to the interests of 
the pack has become loyalty to his master's house- 
hold. In man, too, there has already been obvious 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 93 

modification and sublimation of many instincts. 
The hunting impulse begins in the jungle, and may 
end in the philosopher's exploration of the Infinite. 
It is the combative instinct which drives the reformer 
headlong against the evils of the world, as it once 
drove two cave men at each others' throats. Love, 
which begins in the mergence of two cells, ends in 
the saint's supreme discovery, "Thou art the Love 
wherewith the heart loves Thee." ^ The much ad- 
vertized herd instinct may weld us into a mob at 
the mercy of unreasoning passions; but it can also 
make us living members of the Communion of 
Saints. The appeals of the prophet and the reviv- 
alist, the Psalmist's ''Taste and see," the Baptist's 
''Change your hearts," are all invitations to an 
alteration in the direction of desire, which would 
turn our instinctive energies in a new direction and 
begin the domestication of the human soul for God. 
This, then, is the real business of conversion 
and of the character building that succeeds it; the 
harnessing of instinct to idea and its direction into 
new and more lofty channels of use, transmuting 
the turmoil of man's merely egoistic ambitions, 
anxieties and emotional desires into fresh forms of 
creative energy, and transferring their interest from 
narrow and unreal to universal objectives. The 
seven deadly sins of Christian ethics — Pride, Anger, 
Envy, Avarice, Sloth, Gluttony, and Lust — repre- 

1 "Amor tu se'quel ama 
donde lo cor te ama." 

— ^Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 8i. 



94 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

sent not so much deliberate wrongfulness, as the 
outstanding forms of man's uncontrolled and self- 
regarding instincts; unbridled self-assertion, ruth- 
less acquisitiveness, and undisciplined indulgence of 
sense. The traditional evangelical virtues ot 
Pov6rty, Chastity and Obedience which sum up the 
demands of the spiritual life exactly oppose them. 
Over against the self-assertion of the proud and 
angry is set the ideal of humble obedience, with its 
wise suppleness and abnegation of self-will. Over 
against the acquisitiveness of the covetous and 
envious is set the ideal of inward poverty, with its 
liberation from the narrow self-interest of I, Me 
and Mine. Over against the sensual indulgence of 
the greedy, lustful and lazy is set the ideal of 
chastity, which finds all creatures pure to enjoy, 
since it sees them in God, and God in all creatures. 
Yet all this, rightly understood, is no mere policy 
of repression. It is rather a rational policy of re- 
lease, freeing for higher activities instinctive force 
too often thrown away. It is giving the wild beast 
his work to do, training him. Since the instincts 
represent the efforts of this urgent life in us to 
achieve self-protection and self-realization, it is 
plain that the true regeneration of the psyche, its 
redirection from lower to higher levels, can 
never be accomplished without their help. We only 
rise to the top of our powers when the whole man 
acts together, urged by an enthusiasm or an instinc- 
tive need. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 95 

Further, a complete and ungraduated response 
to stimulus — an *'all-or-none reaction" — Is charac- 
teristic of the instinctive life and of the instinctive 
life alone. Those whom it rules for the time give 
themselves wholly to it; and so display a power far 
beyond that of the critical and the controlled. 
Thus, fear or rage will often confer abnormal 
strength and agility. A really dominant Instinct is a 
veritable source of psycho-physical energy, unifying 
and maintaining in vigour all the activities directed 
to its fulfilment.^ A young man in love is stimulated 
not only to emotional ardour, but also to hard work 
in the interests of the future home. The explorer 
develops amazing powers of endurance; the inven- 
tor in the ecstasy of creation draws on deep vital 
forces, and may carry on for long periods without 
sleep or food. If we apply this law to the great 
examples of the spiritual life, we see in the vigour 
and totality of their self-giving to spiritual interests 
a mark of instinctive action; and in the power, the 
indifference to hardship which these selves develop, 
the result of unification, of an '*all-or-none" response 
to the religious or philanthropic stimulus. It helps 
us to understand the cheerful austerities of the 
true ascetic; the superhuman a-chlevement of St. 
Paul, little hindered by the "thorn in the flesh"; 
the career of St. Joan of Arc; the way in which St. 
Teresa or St. Ignatius, tormented by ill-health, yet 

1 Cf. Watts: "Echo Personalities," for several illustrations of 
this law. 



96 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

brought their great conceptions to birth; the powers 
of resistance displayed by George Fox and other 
Quaker saints. It explains Mary Slessor 1I\- 
ing and working bare-foot and bare-headed under 
the tropical sun, disdaining the use of mosquito nets, 
eating native food, and taking with Impunity daily 
risks fatal to the average European.^ It shows us, 
too, why the great heroes of the spiritual life so 
seldom think out their positions, or husband their 
powers. They act because they are impelled: 
often in defiance of all prudent considerations, 
yet commonly with an amazing success. Thus 
General Booth has said that he was driven by "the 
impulses and urgings of an undying ambition'' to 
save souls. What was this Impulse and urge? 
It was the Instinctive energy of a great nature In a 
sublimated form. The level at which this enhanced 
power is experienced will determine its value for 
life; but Its character is much the same In the con- 
vert at a revival, in the postulant's vivid sense of 
vocation and consequent break with the world, in 
the disinterested man of science consecrated to the 
search for truth, and in the apostle's self-giving to 
the service of God, with its answering gift of new 
strength and fruitfulness. Its secret, and Indeed 
the secret of all transcendence is implied in the di- 
rection of the old English mystic: "Mean God all, 
and all God, so that nought work In thy wit and 
in thy will, but only God." ^ The over-belief, the 

1 Livingstone: "Mary Slessor of Calabar," p. 131. 
^"The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 40. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 97 

religious formula in which this instinctive passion 
is expressed, is comparatively unimportant. The re- 
vivalist, wholly possessed by concrete and anthro- 
pomorphic ideas of God which are impossible to 
a man of different — and, as we suppose, superior — 
education, can yet, because of the burning reality 
with which he lives towards the God so strangely 
conceived, infect those with whom he comes in con- 
tact with the spiritual life. 

We are now in a position to say that the first ne- 
cessity of the hfe of the Spirit is the sublimation of 
the instinctive life, involving the transfer of our in- 
terest and energy to new objectives, the giving of 
our old vigour to new longings and new loves. It 
appears that the invitation of religion to a change 
of heart, rather than a change of belief, is founded 
on solid psychological laws. I need not dwell on 
the way in which Divine love, as the saints have 
understood it, answers to the complete sublimation 
of our strongest natural passion; or the extent in 
which the highest experiences of the religious life 
satisfy man's instinctive craving for self-realization 
within a greater Reality, how he feels himself to be 
fed with a mysterious food, quickened by a fresh 
dower of life, assured of his own safety within 
a friendly universe, given a new objective for his 
energy. It is notorious that one of the most 
striking things about a truly spiritual man is, that 
he has achieved a certain stability which others lack. 
In him, the central craving of the psyche for more 



98 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

life and more love has reached its bourne; instead 
of feeding upon those secondary objects of desire 
which may lull our restlessness but cannot heal it. 
He loves the thing which he ought to love, wants to 
do the deeds which he ought to do, and finds all as- 
pects of his personality satisfied in one objective. 
Every one has really a forced option between the 
costly effort to achieve this sublimation of impulse, 
this unification of the self on spiritual levels, and 
the quiet evasion of it which is really a capitulation 
to the animal instincts and unordered cravings of 
our many-levelled being. We cannot stand still; 
and this steady downward pull keeps us ever in 
mind of all the backward-tending possibilities col- 
lectively to be thought of as sin, and explains to us 
why sloth, lack of spiritual energy, is held by re- 
ligion to be one of the capital forms of human 
wrongness. 

I go on to another point, which I regard as of 
special importance. 

It must not be supposed that the life of the Spirit 
begins and ends with the sublimation of the in- 
stinctive and emotional life; though this is indeed 
for it a central necessity. Nor must we take it for 
granted that the apparent redirection of impulse to 
spiritual objects is always and inevitably an advance. 
All who are or may be concerned with the spiritual 
training, help, and counselling of others ought 
clearly to recognize that there are elements in re- 
ligious experience which represent, not a true sub- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 99 

llmatlon, but either disguised primitive cravings and 
ideas, or uprushes from lower instinctive levels : for 
these experiences have their special dangers. As 
we shall see when we come to their more detailed 
study, devotional practices tend to produce that 
state which psychologists call mobility of the 
threshold of consciousness; and may easily permit 
the emergence of natural inclinations and desires, 
of which the self does not recognize the real char- 
acter. As a matter of fact, a good deal of religious 
emotion is of this kind. Instances are the childish 
longing for mere protection, for a sort of super- 
sensual petting, the excessive desire for shelter and 
rest, voiced in too many popular hymns; the subtle 
form of self-assertion which can be detected in some 
claims to intercourse with God — e. g. the celebrated 
conversation of Angela of Follgno with the Holy 
Ghost ; ^ the thinly veiled human feelings which find 
expression In the personal raptures of a certain type 
of pious literature, and In what has been well 
described as the ^'divine duet" type of devotion. 
Many, though not all of the supernormal phenom- 
ena of mysticism are open to the same suspicion: 
and the Church's constant Insistence on the need of 
submitting these to some critical test before, accept- 
ing them at face value. Is based on a most whole- 
some scepticism. Though a sense of meek depen- 

1 "And very often did He say unto me, 'Bride and daughter, 
sweet art thou unto Me, I love thee better than any other who 
is in the valley of Spoleto.' " ("The Divine Consolations of Blessed 
Angela of Foligno," p. i6o.) 



100 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

dence on enfolding love and power is the very 
heart of religion, and no intense spiritual life is 
possible unless it contain a strong emotional element, 
it is of first importance to be sure that its affective 
side represents a true sublimation of human feel- 
ings and desires, and not merely an oblique in- 
dulgence of lower cravings. 

Again, we have to remember that the instinctive 
self, powerful though it be, does not represent the 
sum total of human possibility. The maximum of 
man's strength is not reached until all the self's 
powers, the instinctive and also the rational, are 
united and set on one objective; for then only is he 
safe from the insidious inner conflict between 
natural craving and conscious purpose which saps 
his energies, and is welded into a complete and 
harmonious instrument of life. *'The source of 
power," says Dr. Hadfield in "The Spirit," lies not 
in instinctive emotion alone, but in instinctive emo- 
tiqn expressed in a way with which the whole man 
can, for the time being at least, identify himself. 
Ultimately, this is impossible without the achieve- 
ment of a harmony of all the instincts and the ap- 
proval of the reason." ^ 

Thus w^e see that any unresolved conflict or 
divorce between the religious instinct and the in- 
tellect will mar the full power of the spiritual life: 
and that an essential part of the self's readjustment 
to reality must consist in the uniting of these 

i"The Spirit," edited by B. H. Streeter, p. 93- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 101 

partners, as Intellect and Intuition are united In 
creative art. The noblest music, most satisfying 
poetry are neither the casual results of uncritlclzed 
insrpiratlon nor the deliberate fabrications of the 
brain, but are born of the perfect fusion of feel- 
ing and of thought; for the* greatest and most fruit- 
ful minds are those which are rich and active on 
both levels — which are perpetually raising blind 
Impulse to the level of conscious purpose, uniting 
energy with skill, and thus obtaining the fiery en- 
ergies of the instinctive life for the highest uses. 
So too the spiritual life Is only seen In Its full worth 
and splendour when the whole man is subdued to 
it, and one Object satisfies the utmost desires of 
heart and mind. The spiritual Impulse must not be 
allowed to become the centre of a group of 
specialized feelings, a devotional complex. In opposi- 
tion to, or at least alienated from, the intellectual 
and economic life. It must on the contrary brim 
over, invading every department of the self. When 
the mind's loftiest and most Ideal thought, its 
conscious vivid aspiration, has been united with the 
more robust qualities of the natural man; then, and 
only then, we have the material for the making of 
a possible saint. 

We must also remember that. Important as our 
primitive and instinctive life may be — and we 
should neither despise nor neglect it — its religious 
impulses, taken alone, no more represent the full 
range of man's spiritual possibilities than the life 



102 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

of the hunting tribe or the African kraal represent 
his full social possibilities. We may, and should, 
acknowledge and learn from our psychic origins. 
We must never be content to rest in them. Though 
in many respects, mental as well as physical, we are 
animals still; yet we are animals with a possible 
future in the making, both corporate and individual, 
which we cannot yet define. All other levels of 
life assure us that the impulsive nature is peculiarly 
susceptible to education. Not only can the whole 
group of instincts which help self-fulfilment be di- 
rected to higher levels, united and subdued to a 
dominant emotional interest; but merely instinctive 
actions can, by repetition and control, be raised to 
the level of habit and be given improved precision 
and complexity. This, of course, is a primary func- 
tion of devotional exercises; training the first blind 
instinct for God to the complex responses of the 
life of prayer. Instinct is at best a rough and 
ready tool of life: practice is required if it is to 
produce its be^t results. Observe, for instanqe, 
the poor efforts of the young bird to escape capture; 
and compare this with the finished performance of 
the parent. ^ Therefore in estimating man's ca- 
pacity for spiritual response, we must reckon not 
only his innate instinct for God, but also his capacity 
for developing this instinct on the level of habit; 
educating and using its latent powers to the best 
advantage. Especially on the contemplative side 

iCf. B. Russell: "The Analysis of Mind," Cap. 2. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 103 

of life, education does great things for us; or would 
do, if we gave it the chance. Here, then, the ra- 
tional mind and conscious will must play their part 
in that great business of human transcendence, 
which is man's function within the universal plan. 

It is true that the deep-seated human tendency to 
God may best be understood as the highest form of 
that out-going instinctive craving of the psyche for 
more life and love which, on whatever level it be 
experienced, is always one. But some external 
stimulus seems to be needed, if this deep tendency 
is to be brought up into consciousness; and some ed- 
ucation, if it is to be fully expressed. This stimulus 
and this education, in normal cases, are given by 
tradition; that is to say, by religious belief and 
practice. Or they may come from the countless 
minor and cumulative suggestions which life makes 
to us, and which few of us have the subtlety to 
analyze. If these suggestions of tradition or en- 
vironment are met by resistance, either of the moral 
or intellectual order, whilst yet the deep instinct for 
full life remains unsatisfied, the result is an inner 
conflict of more or less severity; and as a rule, this 
is only resolved and harmony achieved through the 
crisis of conversion, breaking down resistances, lib- 
erating emotion and reconciling inner craving with 
outer stimulus. There is, however, nothing spir- 
itual in the conversion process itself. It has its 
parallel in other drastic readjustments to other 
levels of life; and is merely a method by which 



104 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

selves of a certain type seem best able to achieve 
the union of feeling, thought, and will necessary 
to stability. 

Now we have behind us and within us all hu- 
manity's funded Instinct for the Divine, all the racial 
habits and traditions of response to the Divine. 
But its valid thought about the Divine comes as yet 
to very little. Thus we see that the author of 
"The Cloud of Unknowing" spoke as a true 
psychologist when he said that "a secret blind love 
pressing towards God" held more hope of success 
than mere thought can ever do; "for He may well 
be loved but not thought — by love He may be gotten 
and holden, but by thought never." ^ Neverthe- 
less, If that consistency of deed and belief which 
Is essential to full power is to be achieved by us, 
every man's conception of the God Whom he serves 
ought to be the very best of which he is capable. 
Because Ideas which we recognize as partial or 
primitive have called forth the richness and devo- 
tion of other natures, we are not therefore excused 
from trying all things and seeking a Reality which 
fulfils to the utmost our craving for truth and 
beauty, as well as our Instinct for good. It Is easy, 
natural, and always comfortable for the human 
mind to sink back Into something just a little bit 
below its highest possible. On one hand to wallow 
in easy loves, rest in traditional formulas, or enjoy 
a "moving type of devotion which makes no In- 

1 Op. cit., Cap. 6. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 105 

tellectual demand. On the other, to accept without 
criticism the sceptical attitude of our neighbours, 
and keep safely in the furrow of intelligent agnos- 
ticism. 

Religious people have a natural inclination to 
trot along on mediocre levels; reacting pleasantly 
to all the usual practices, playing down to the hopes 
and fears of the primitive mind, its childish craving 
for comfort and protection, its tendency to rest in 
symbols and spells, and satisfying its devotional in- 
clinations by any "long psalter unmindfully mumbled 
in the teeth." ^ And a certain type of Intelligent 
people have an equally natural tendency to dismiss, 
without further worry, the traditional notions of 
the past. In so far as all this represents a slipping 
back in the racial progress, it has the character 
of sin: at any rate, it lacks the true character of 
spiritual life. Such life involves growth, sublima- 
tion, the constant and difficult redirection of en- 
ergy from lower to higher levels; a real effort to 
purge motive, see things more truly, face and resolve 
the conflict between the deep instinctive and the 
newer rational life. Hence, those who realize the 
nature of their own mental processes sin against 
the light if they do not do with them the very best 
that they possibly can: and the penalty of this sin 
must be a narrowing of vision, an arrest. The 
laws of apperception apply with at least as much 
force to our spiritual as to our sensual impressions : 

1 "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 37. 



106 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

what we bring with us will condition what we 
obtain. 

"We behold that which we are!" said Ruysbroeck 
long ago. ^ The mind's content and its ruling feel- 
ing-tone, says psychology, all its memories and 
desires, mingle with all incoming impressions, colour 
them and condition those which our consciousness 
selects. This intervention of memory and emotion 
in our perceptions is entirely involuntary; and ex- 
plains why the devotee of any specific creed always 
finds in the pure immediacy of religious experience 
the special marks of his own belief. In most acts 
of perception — and probably, too, in the intuitional 
awareness of religious experience — that which the 
mind brings is bulkier if less important than that 
which It receives; and only the closest analysis will 
enable us to separate these two elements. Yet this 
machinery of apperception — humbling though its 
realization must be to the eager idealist — does not 
merely confuse the issue for us; or compel us to 
agnosticism as to the true content of religious in- 
tuition. On the contrary, its comprehension gives 
us the clue to many theological puzzles; whilst its 
existence enables us to lay hold of supersensual ex- 
periences we should otherwise miss, because it gives 
to us the means of interpreting them. Pure im- 
mediacy, as such. Is almost ungraspable by us. As 
man, not as pure spirit, the High Priest entered the 
Holy of Holies: that is to say, he took to the en- 

1 Ruysbroeck: "The Sparkling Stone," Cap. 9- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 107 

counter of the Infinite the finite machinery of sense. 
This limitation is ignored by us at our perlL The 
great mystics, who have sought to strip off all image 
and reach — as they say — the Bare Pure Truth, have 
merely become inarticulate In their effort to tell 
us what it was that they knew. *'A light I 
cannot 'measure, goodness without form!" exclaims 
Jacopone da Todi. ^ *^The Light of the World — 
the Good Shepherd,** says St. John, bringing a richly 
furnished poetic consciousness to the vision of God; 
and at once gives us something on which to lay 
hold. ' 

Generally speaking, it is only in so far as we 
bring with us a plan of the universe that we can 
make anything of it; and only In so far as we bring 
with us some idea of God, some feeling of desire 
for Him, can we apprehend Him — so true is it that 
we do, indeed, behold that which we are, find that 
which we seek, receive that for which we ask. 
Feeling, thought, and tradition must all contribute 
to the full working out of religious experience. 
The empty soul facing an unconditioned Reality 
may achieve freedom but assuredly achieves nothing 
else: for though the self-giving of Spirit Is abun- 
dant, we control our own powers of reception. 
This lays on each self the duty of filling the mind 
with the noblest possible thoughts about God, re- 
fusing unworthy and narrow conceptions, and keep- 
ing alight the fire of His love. We shall find that 

iLauda 91. 



108 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

which we seek: hence a richly stored religious 
consciousness, the lofty conceptions of the truth 
seeker, the vision of the artist, the boundless charity 
and joy in life of the lover of his kind, really con- 
tribute to the fulness of the spiritual life; both on 
its active and on its contemplative side. As the 
self reaches the first degrees of the prayerful or 
recollected state, memory-elements, released from 
the competition of realistic experience, enter the 
foreconscious field. Among these will be the stored 
remembrances of past meditations, reading, and ex- 
periences, all giving an affective tone conducive to 
new and deeper apprehensions. The pure in heart 
see God, because they bring with them that radiant 
and undemanding purity: because the storehouse of 
ancient memories, which each of us inevitably brings 
to that encounter, is free from conflicting desires 
and images, perfectly controlled by this feeling-tone. 
It is now clear that all which we have so far 
considered supports, from the side of psychology, 
the demand of every religion for a drastic over- 
haul of the elements of character, a real repentance 
and moral purgation, as the beginning of all per- 
sonal spiritual life. Man does not, as a rule, reach 
without much effort and suffering the higher levels 
of his psychic being. His old attachments are hard; 
complexes of which he is hardly aware must be 
broken up before he can use the forces which they 
enchain. He must, then, examine without flinch- 
ing his impulsive life, and know what is in his 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 109 

heart, before he is In a position to change It. "The 
light which shows us our sins," says George Fox, 
"is the light that heals us." All those repressed 
cravings, those quietly unworthy motives, those 
mean acts which we instinctively thrust into the 
hiddenness and disguise or forget, must be brought 
to the surface and, In the language of psychology, 
"abreacted"; in the language of religion, confessed. 
The whole doctrine of repentance really hinges on 
this question of abreacting painful or wrongful ex- 
perience instead: of repressing it. The broken and 
contrite heart Is the heart of which the hard com- 
plexes have been shattered by sorrow and love, and 
their elements brought up Into consciousness and 
faced: and only the self which has endured this, can 
hope to be established in the free Spirit. It Is a 
process of spiritual hygiene. 

Psycho-analysis has taught us the danger of keep- 
ing skeletons in the cupboards of the soul, the Im- 
portance of tracking down our real motives, of 
facing reality, of being candid and fearless In self- 
knowledge. But the emotional colour of this process 
when It is undertaken in the full conviction of the 
power and holiness of that life-force which we have 
not used as well as we might, and with a humble 
and loving consciousness of our deficiency, our fall- 
ing short, will be totally different from the feeling 
state of those who conceive themselves to be search- 
ing for the merely animal sources of their mental 
and spiritual life. "Meekness in itself," says "The 



no THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Cloud of Unknowing," is naught else but a true 
knowing and feeling of a man's self as he Is. 'For 
surely whoso might verily see and feel himself as 
he Is, he should verily be meek. Therefore swink 
and sweat all that thou canst and mayst for to get 
thee a true knowing and feeling of thyself as thou 
art; and then I trow that soon after that thou shalt 
have a true knowing and feeling of God as he is." ^ 
The essence, then, of repentance and purifica- 
tion of character consists first In the identification, 
and next In the sublimation of our Instinctive powers 
and tendencies; their detachment from egoistic 
desires and dedication to new purposes. We 
should not starve or repress the abounding life 
within us; but, relieving It of its concentration on 
the here-and-now, give its attention and its passion a 
wider circle of Interest over which to range, a 
greater love to which it can consecrate Its growing 
powers. We do not yet know what the limit of 
such sublimation may be. But we do know that it 
is the true path of life's advancement, that already 
we owe to It our purest loves, our loveliest visions, 
and our noblest deeds. When such feeling, such 
vision and such act are united and transfigured in 
God, and find In contact with His living Spirit the 
veritable sources of their power; then, man will 
have resolved his Inner conflict, developed his true 
potentialities, and live a harmonious because a spir- 
itual life. 

^ Op. cit., Cap. 13. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 111 

We end, therefore, upon this conception of the 
psyche as the living force within us; a storehouse 
of ancient memories and animal tendencies, yet plas- 
tic, adaptable, ever pressing on and ever craving 
for more life and more love. Only the life of real- 
ity, the life rooted in communion with God, will 
ever satisfy that hungry spirit, or provide an ad- 
equate objective for its persistent onward push. 



CHAPTER IV 

PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

(II) Contemplation and Suggestion 

In the last chapter we considered what the mod- 
ern analysis of mind had to tell us about the nature 
of the spiritual life, the meaning of sin and of salva- 
tion. We now go on to another aspect of this 
subject: namely, the current conception of the un- 
conscious mind as a dominant factor of our psychic 
life, and of the extent and the conditions in which its 
resources can be tapped, and its powers made ame- 
nable to the direction of the conscious mind. Two 
principal points must here be studied. The first 
is the mechanism of that which is called autistic 
thinking and its relation to religious experience: 
the second, the laws of suggestion and their bear- 
ing upon the spiritual life. Especially must we con- 
sider from this point of view the problems which 
are resumed under the headings of prayer, con- 
templation, and grace. We shall find ourselves 
compelled to examine the nature of meditation and 
recollection, as spiritual persons have always prac- 
tised them; and to give, if we can, a psychological 
account of many of their classic conceptions and 

112 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 113 

activities. We shall therefore be much concerned 
with those experiences which are often called mys- 
tical, but which I prefer to call in general contem- 
plative and intuitive; because they extend, as we 
shall find, without a break from the simplest type 
of mental prayer, the most general apprehensions 
of the Spirit, to the most fully developed examples 
of religious mono-ideism. To place all those in- 
tuitions and perceptions of which God or His 
Kingdom are the objects in a class apart from all 
other intuitions and perceptions, and call them "mys- 
tical," is really to beg the question from the start. 
The psychic mechanisms involved In them are seen 
in action in many other types of mental activity; 
and will not. In my opinion, be understood until 
they are removed from the category of the super- 
natural, and studied as the movements of the one 
spirit of life — here directed towards a transcen- 
dent objective. And further we must ever keep 
in mind, since we are now dealing with specific spir- 
itual experiences, deeply exploring the contem- 
plative soul, that though psychology can criticize 
these experiences, and help us to separate the wheat 
from the chaff — can tell us, too, a good deal about 
the machinery by which we lay hold of them, and 
the best way to use it — it cannot explain the ex- 
periences, pronounce upon their Object, or reduce 
that Object to its own terms. 

We may some day have a valid psychology of 
religion, though we are far from it yet: but when 



114 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

we do, it will only be true within its own system of 
reference. It will deal with the fact of the spirit- 
ual life from one side only. And as a discussion of 
the senses and their experience explains nothing 
about the universe by which these senses are im- 
pressed, so all discussion of spiritual faculty and 
experience remains within the human radius and 
neither invalidates nor accounts for the spiritual 
world. When the psychologist has finished telling 
us all that he knows about the rules which govern 
our mental life, and how to run it best, he is still 
left face to face with the mystery of that life, and 
of that human power of surrender to Spiritual 
Reality which is the very essence of religion. Hu- 
mility remains, therefore, not only the most becom- 
ing but also the most scientific attitude for inves- 
tigators in this field. We must, then, remember the 
inevitably symbolic nature of the language which we 
are compelled to use in our attempt to describe these 
experiences; and resist all temptation to confuse the 
handy series of labels with which psychology has 
furnished us, with the psychic unity to which they 
will be attached. 

Perhaps the most fruitful of all our recent dis- 
coveries in the mental region will turn out to be 
that which is gradually revealing to us the extent 
and character of the unconscious mind; and the pos- 
sibility of tapping its resources, bending its plastic 
shape to our own mould. It seems as though the 
laws of its being are at last beginning to be under- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 115 

stood ; giving a new content to the ancient command 
^'Know* thyself." We are learning that psycho- 
therapy, which made such Immense strides during the 
war, is merely one of the directions In which this 
knowledge may be used, and this control exercised 
by us. That regnancy of spirit over matter to- 
wards which all idealists must look, is by way of 
toming at least to a partial fulfilment in this control 
of the conscious over the unconscious, and thus over 
the bodily life. Such control is indeed an aspect 
of our human freedom, of the creative power which 
has been put into our hands. In all this religion 
must be Interested: because, once more, it is the 
business of religion to regenerate the whole man 
and win him for Reality. 

If we could get rid of the idea that the uncon- 
scious is a separate, and in some sort hostile or 
animal entity set over against the conscious mind; 
and realize that it is, simply, our whole personality, 
with the exception of the scrap that happens at 
any moment to be in consciousness — then, perhaps, 
we should more easily grasp the importance of ex- 
ploring and mobilizing its powers. As it is, most 
of us behave like the owners of a well-furnished 
room, who ignore every aspect of it except the 
window looking out upon the street. This we keep 
polished, and drape with the best curtains that we 
can afford. But the room upon which we sedulously 
turn X)ur backs contains all that we have inherited, 
all that we have accumulated, many tools which are 



116 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

rusting for want of use; machinery too which, left 
to Itself, may function satisfactorily, or may get 
out of order and work to results that we neither 
desire nor dream. The room Is twUIt. Only by 
the window Is a little patch of light. Beyond this 
there Is a fringe of vague, fluctuating, sometimes 
prismatic radiance: an Intermediate region, where 
the Images and things which most Interest us have 
their place, just within range, or the fringe of the 
field of consciousness. In the darkest corners the 
machinery that we do not understand, those posses- 
sions of which we are least proud, and those pictures 
we hate to look at, are hidden away. 

This little parable represents, more or less, that 
which psychology means by the conscious, forecon- 
scious, and unconscious regions of the psyche. It 
must not be pressed, or too literally Interpreted; 
but it helps us to remember the graded character 
of our consciousness, its fluctuating level, and the 
fact that, as well as the outward-looking mind which 
alone we usually recognize, there is also the psychic 
matrix from which it has been developed, the in- 
ward-looking mind, caring for a variety of Inter- 
ests of which we hardly, as we say, think at all. We 
know as yet little about this mysterious psychic 
whole; the inner nature of which is only very in- 
completely given to us in the fluctuating exeriences 
of consciousness. But we do know that it, too, re- 
ceives at least a measure of the light and the mes- 
sages coming in by the window of our wits: that it 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 117 

is the home of memory instinct and habit, the source 
of conduct, and that its control and modification 
form the major part of the training of character. 
Further, it is sensitive, plastic, accessible to impres- 
sions, and unforgetting. 

Consider now that half-lit region which is called 
the foreconscious mind; for this is of special inter- 
est to the spiritual life. It is, in psychological lan- 
guage, the region of autistic as contrasted with 
realistic thought.^ That is to say, it is the agent 
of reverie and meditation; it is at work in all our 
brooding states, from day-dream to artistic creation. 
Such autistic thought is dominated not by logic or 
will, but by feeling. It achieves its results by 
intuition, and has its reasons which the surface mind 
knows not of. Here, in this fringe-region — which 
alone seems fully able to experience adoration and 
wonder, or apprehend the values we call holiness, 
beauty or love — Is the source of that intuition of 
the heart to which the mystic owes the love which is 
knowledge, and the knowledge which Is love. Here 
is the true home of inspiration and invention. 
Here, by a process which is seldom fully conscious 
save in its final stages, the poet's creations are pre- 
pared, and thence presented In the form of inspira- 
tion to the reason; which — if he be a great artist — 
criticizes them, before they are given as poems to 
the world. Indeed, in all man's apprehensions of 
the transcendental these two states of the psyche 

' On all this, cf. J. Varendonck, "The Psychology of Day- 
dreams." 



118 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

must co-operate if he is to realize his full powers: 
and it is significant that to this foreconscious region 
religion, in its own special language, has always in- 
vited him to retreat, if he would know his own soul 
and thus commune with his God. Over and over 
again it assures him under various metaphors, that 
he must turn within, withdraw from the window, 
meet the inner guest; and such a withdrawal is the 
condition of all contemplation. 

Consider the opening of Jacob Boehme's great 
dialogue on the -Supersensual Life. 

"The Scholar said to his Master: How may I 
come to the supersensual life, that I may see God 
and hear Him speak? 

"His Master said: When thou canst throw thy- 
self for a moment into that where no creature 
dwclleth, then thou hearest what God speaketh. 

"The Scholar said: Is that near at hand or far 
off? 

"The Master said: It is in thee, if thou canst for 
a while cease from all thinking and willing, thou 
shalt hear the unspeakable words of God. 

"The Scholar said: How can I hear when I stand 
still from thinking and willing? 

"The Master said: When thou standest still from 
the thinking and willing of self, then the eternal 
hearing, seeing and speaking will be revealed in 
thee." 1 

In this passage we have a definite invitation to 

1 Jacob Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 119 

retreat from volItiorLal to affective thought: from 
the window to the quiet place where *'no creature 
dwelleth," and in Patmore's phrase *'the night of 
thought becomes the light of perception." ^ This 
fringe-region or foreconscious is in fact the organ 
of contemplation, as the realistic outward looking 
mind is the organ of action. Most men go through 
life without conceiving, far less employing, the rich 
possibilities which are implicit in it. Yet here, 
among the many untapped resources of the self, lie 
our powers of response to our spiritual environment : 
powers which are kept by the tyrannical interests of 
everyday life below the threshold of full conscious- 
ness, and never given a chance to emerge. Here 
take place those searching experiences of the "Inner 
life" which seem moonshine or morbidity to those 
who have not known them. 

The many people who complain that they have 
no such personal religious experience, that the spirit- 
ual world is shut to them, are usually found to have 
expected this experience to be given to them without 
any deliberate and sustained effort on their own part. 
They have lived from childhood to maturity at the 
little window of consciousness and have never given 
themselves the opportunity of setting up correspond- 
ences with any other world than that of sense. Yet 
all normal men and women possess, at least in a 
rudimentary form, some intuition of the transcen- 
dental; shown in their power of experiencing beauty 

^Patmore: "The Rod, the Root and the Flower: Aurea Dicta," 
13. 



120 THE LIFE CF THE SPIRIT 

or love. In some It is dominant, emerging easily 
and without help; in others it is latent and must be 
developed in the right way. In others again it may 
exist in virtual conflict with a strongly realistic out- 
look; gathering way until it claims its rights at last 
in a psychic storm. Its emergence, however 
achieved, is a part — and for our true life, by far the 
most important part — of that outcropping and over- 
flowing into consciousness of the marginal faculties 
which is now being recognized as essential to all 
artistic and creative activities; and as playing, too, a 
large part in the regulation of mental and bodily 
health. 

All the great religions have implicitly understood 
— though without analysis — the vast importance of 
these spiritual intuitions and faculties lying below 
the surface of the everyday mind; and have per- 
fected machinery tending to secure their release and 
their training. This is of two kinds: first, religious 
ceremonial, addressing itself to corporate feeling; 
next the discipline of meditation and prayer, which 
educates the individual to the same ends, gradually 
developing the powers of the foreconscious region, 
steadying them, and bringing them under the control 
of the purified will. Without some such education, 
widely as its details may vary, there can be no real 
living of the spiritual life. 

"A going out into the life of sense 
Preventeth the exercise of earnest realization." ^ 

iRuysbroeck: "The Book of the XII Beguines," Cap. 6. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 121 

Psychologists sometimes divide men into the two 
extreme classes of extroverts and introverts. The 
extrovert is the typical active ; always leaning out of 
the window and setting up contacts with the outside 
world. His thinking is mainly realistic. That is 
to say, it deals with the data of sense. The intro- 
vert is the typical contemplative, predominantly 
interested in the Inner world. His thinking is 
mainly autistic, dealing with the results of Intuition 
and feeling, working these up into new structures 
and extorting from them new experiences. He is 
at home in the foreconscious, has its peculiar powers 
under control; and instinctively obedient to the mys- 
tic command to sink into the ground of the soul, 
he leans towards those deep wells of his own being 
which plunge Into the unconscious foundations of life. 
By this avoidance of total concentration on the sense 
world — though material obtained from it must as a 
matter of fact enter Into all, even his most '^spirit- 
ual" creations — he seems able to attend to the 
messages which intuition picks up from other levels 
of being. It Is significant that nearly all spiritual 
writers use this very term of Introversion, which 
psychology has now adopted as the most accurate 
that It can find. In a favourable, indeed laudatory, 
sense. By It they Intend to describe the healthy 
expansion of the Inner life, the development of the 
soul's power of attention to the spiritual, which is 
characteristic of those real men and women of 
prayer whom Ruysbroeck describes as : — 



122 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

"Gazing inward with an eye uplifted and open to the Eter- 
nal Truth 

Inwardly abiding in simplicity and stillness and in utter 
peace." ^ 

It is certain that no one who wholly lacks this 
power of retreat from the surface, and has failed 
thus to mobilize his foreconscious energies, can live 
a spiritual life. This is why silence and meditation 
play so large a part in all sane religious discipline. 
But the ideal state, a state answering to that rhythm 
of work and prayer which should be the norm of 
a mature spirituality, is one in which we have 
achieved that mental flexibility and control which 
puts us in full possession of our autistic and our 
realistic powers; balancing and unifying the inner 
and the outer world. 

This being so, it is worth while to consider in 
more detail the character of foreconscious thought. 

Foreconscious thinking, as It commonly occurs in 
us, with its unchecked Illogical stream of images and 
Ideas, moving towards no assigned end, combined 
In no ordered chain, is merely what we usually call 
day-dream. But where a definite wish or purpose, an 
end, dominates this reverie and links up Its Images 
and ideas Into a cycle, we get In combination all the 
valuable properties both of affective and of directed 
thinking; although the reverie or contemplation 
takes place in the fringe-region of our mental life, 
and In apparent freedom from the control of the con- 

i"The Book of the i^CII Beguines," Cap. 7. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 123 

sclous reason. The object of recollection and med- 
itation, which are the first stages of mental prayer, 
is to set going such a series and to direct it towards 
an assigned end: and this first inward-turning act 
and self-orientation are voluntary, though the activ- 
ities which they set up are not. *'You must know, 
my daughters," says St. Teresa, "that this is no 
supernatural act but depends on our will; and that 
therefore we can do it, with that ordinary assistance 
of God which we need for all our acts and even for 
our good thoughts." ^ 

Consider for a moment what happens in prayer. 
I pass over the simple recitation of verbal prayers, 
which will better be dealt with when we come to 
consider the institutional framework of the spiritual 
life. We are now concerned with mental prayer 
or orison; the simplest of those degrees of contem- 
plation which may pass gradually into mystical expe- 
rience, and are at least in some form a necessity of 
any real and actualized spiritual life. Such prayer 
is well defined by the mystics, as *'a devout intent 
directed to God." ^ What happens in it? All 
writers on the science of prayer observe, that the 
first necessity is Recollection; which, in a rough and 
ready way, we may render as concentration, or per- 
haps in the special language of psychology as "con- 
tention." The mind is called in from external 
interests and distractions, one by one the avenues 

1 "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 29. 

2 "The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 39. 



121 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

of sense are closed, till the hum of the world is 
hardly perceived hy it. I need not labour this 
description, for it is a state of which we must all 
have experience: but those who wish to see it de- 
scribed with the precision of genius, need only turn 
to St. Teresa's "Way of Perfection." Having 
achieved this, we pass gradually into the condition 
of deep withdrawal variously called Simplicity or 
Quiet; a state in which the attention is quietly and 
without effort directed to God, and the whole self 
as it were held in His presence. This presence is 
given, dimly or clearly, in intuition. The actual 
prayer used will probably consist — again to use 
technical language — of "affective acts and aspira- 
tions"; short phrases repeated and held, perhaps 
expressing penitence, humility, adoration or love, and 
for the praying self charged with profound signif- 
icance. 

"If we would intentively pray for getting of 
good," says "The Cloud of Unknowing," "let us cry 
either with word or with thought or with desire, 
nought else nor on more words but this word 
God. . . . Study thou not for no words, for so 
shouldst thou never come to thy purpose nor to this 
work, for it is never got by study, but all only by 
grace." ^ 

Now the question naturally arises, how does this 
recollected state, this aloglcal brooding on a spirit- 
ual theme, exceed in religious value the orderly 

1 Ibid. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 125 

saying of one's prayers? And the answer psychol- 
ogy suggests is, that more of us, not less, is engaged 
in such a spiritual act: that not only the conscious 
attention, but the foreconscious region too is then 
thrown open to the highest sources of life. We are 
at last learning to recognize the existence of delicate 
mental processes which entirely escape the crude 
methods of speech. Reverie as a genuine thought 
process is beginning to be studied with the attention 
it deserves, and new understanding of prayer must 
result. By its means powers of perception and 
response ordinarily latent are roused to action; and 
thus the whole life is enriched. That faculty in us 
which corresponds, not with the busy life of suc- 
cession but with the eternal sources of power, gets 
its chance. "Though the soul," says Von Hiigel, 
''cannot abidingly abstract itself from its fellows, 
it can and ought frequently to recollect itself in a 
simple sense of God's presence. Such moments of 
direct preoccupation with God alone bring a deep 
refreshment and simplification to the soul." ^ 

True silence, says William Penn, of this quiet 
surrender to reality, ''is rest to the mind, and is to 
the spirit what sleep is to the body; nourishment and 
refreshment." ^ Psychology endorses the constant 
statements of all religions of the Spirit, that no one 
need hope to live a spiritual life who cannot find a 
little time each day for this retreat from the window, 

1 "Eternal Life," p. 396. 

2 Penn: "No Cross, No Crown." 



126 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

this quiet and loving waiting upon the unseen 
"with the forces of the soul," as Ruysbroeck puts it, 
^'gathered into unity of the Spirit." ^ Under these 
conditions, and these only, the intuitive, creative, 
artistic powers are captured and dedicated to the 
highest ends: and in these powers rather than the 
rational our best chance of apprehending eternal 
values abides. "Taste and see that the Lord is 
sweet." ''Be still! be still! and know that I am 
God I" 

Since, then, the foreconscious mind and its activ- 
ities are of such paramount interest to the spiritual 
life, wc may before we go on glance at one or two 
of its characteristics. And first we notice that the 
fact that the foreconscious is, so to speak, in charge 
in the mental and contemplative type of prayer 
explains why it Is that even the most devout persons 
are so constantly tormented by distractions whilst 
engaged in it. Very often, they are utterly unable 
to keep their attention fixed; and the reason of this 
is, that conscious attention and thought are not the 
faculties primarily involved. What is involved, 
is reverie coloured by feeling; and this tends to 
depart from its assigned end and drift into mere 
day-dream, if the emotional tension slackens or 
some intruding image starts a new train of associa- 
tions. The religious mind is distressed by this con- 
stant failure to look steadily at that which alone it 
wants to see; but the failure abides in the fact that 

1 "The Book of the XII Beguines," Cap. 7. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 127 

the machinery used Is affective, and obedient to the 
rise and fall of feeling rather than the control of the 
win. ''By love shall He be gotten a^d holden, by 
thought never." 

Next, consider for a moment the way in which 
the foreconsclous does and must present its appre- 
hensions to consciousness. Its cognitions of the 
spiritual are In the nature of pure immediacy, of 
uncritlcized contacts: and the best and greatest of 
them seem to elude altogether that machinery of 
speech and Image which has been developed throu'gh 
the life of sense. The well-known language of 
spiritual writers about the divine darkness or igno- 
rance is an acknowledgment of this. God Is "known 
darkly." Our experience of Eternity Is "that of 
which nothing can be said." It is "beyond feeling" 
and "beyond knowledge," a certitude known In the 
ground of the soul, and so forth. It is Indeed true 
that the spiritual world is for the human mind a 
transcendent world, does differ utterly in kind from 
the best that the world of succession is able to give 
us ; as we know once for all when we establish a con- 
tact with it, however fleeting. But constantly the 
foreconsclous — which, as we shall do well to remem- 
ber, is the artistic region of the mind, the home of 
the poem, and the creative phantasy — works up Its 
transcendent intuitions in symbolic form. For this 
purpose it sometimes uses the machinery of speech, 
sometimes that of image. As our ordinary reveries 
constantly proceed by way of an interior conversa- 



128 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

tlon or narrative, so the content of spiritual con- 
templation is often expressed in dialogue, in which 
memory and belief are fused with the fruit of percep- 
tion. The "Dialogue of St. Catherine of Siena," 
the *'Life of Suso," and the "Imitation of Christ," 
all provide beautiful examples of this; but indeed 
illustrations of it might be found in every school and 
period of religious literature. 

Such inward dialogue, one of the commonest spon- 
taneous forms of autistic thought, is perpetually 
resorted to by devout minds to actualize their con- 
sciousness of direct communion with God. I need 
not point out how easily and naturally it expresses 
for them that sense of a F>iend and Companion, 
an indwelling power and support, which is perhaps 
their characteristic experience. "Blessed is that 
soul," says a Kempis, "that heareth the Lord speak- 
ing in him and takcth from His mouth the word of 
consolation. Blessed be those ears that receive of 
God's whisper and take no heed of the whisper of 
this world." ^ Though St. John of the Cross has 
reminded us with blunt candour that such persons 
are for the most part only talking to themselves, we 
need not deny the value of such a talking as a means 
of expressing the deeply known and intimate pres- 
ence of Spirit. Moreover, the thoughts and words in 
which the contemplative expresses his sense of love 
and dedication reverberate as it were in the depths 
of the instinctive mind, now in this quietude thrown 

1 De Imit. Christi, Bk. Ill, Cap. i. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 129 

open to these influences : and the Instinctive mind, as 
we have already seen, is the home of character and 
of habit formation. 

Where there is a tendency to think in images 
rather than in words, the experiences of the Spirit 
may be actualized in the form of vision rather than 
of dialogue: and here again, memory and feeling 
will provide the material. Here we stand at the 
sources of religious art: which, when it is genuine, 
is a symbolic picture of the experiences of faith, and 
in those minds attuned to It may evoke again the 
memory or very presence of those experiences. But 
many minds are, as it were, their own religious 
artists; and build up for themselves psychic struc- 
tures answering to their intuitive apprehensions. So 
vivid may these structures sometimes be for them 
that — to revert again to our original simile — the 
self turns from the window and the realistic world 
without, and becomes for the time wholly concen- 
trated on the symbolic drama or picture within the 
room; which abolishes all awareness of the every- 
day world. When this happens In a small way, we 
have what might be called a religious day-dream of 
more or less beauty and intensity; such as most de- 
vout people who tend to visuaHzation have probably 
known. When the break with the ex:ternal world 
is complete, we get those ecstatic visions in which 
mystics of a certain type actualize their spiritual 
intuitions. The Bible Is full of examples of this. 
Good historic instances are the visions of Mechthild 



130 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

of Magdeburg or Angela of Foligno. The first 
contain all the elements of drama, the last cover a 
wide symbolic and emotional field. Those who 
have read Canon Streeter's account of the visions 
of the Sadhu Sundar Singh will recognize them as 
being of this type.^ 

I do not wish to go further than this into the 
abnormal and extreme types of religious autism; 
trance, ecstasy and so forth. Our concern is with 
the norm of the spiritual life, as it exists to-day and 
as all may live it. But it is necessary to realize that 
image and vision do within limits represent a per- 
fectly genuine way of doing things, which is in- 
evitable for deeply spiritual selves of a certain type; 
and that it is neither good psychology nor good 
Christianity, lightly to dismiss as superstition or hys- 
teria the pictured world of symbol in which our 
neighbour may live and save his soul. The symbolic 
world of traditional piety, with its angels and de- 
mons, Its friendly saints, its spatial heaven, may con- 
serve and communicate spiritual values far better 
than the more sophisticated universe of religious 
philosophy. We may be sure that both are more 
characteristic of the image-making and structure- 
building tendencies of the mind, than they are of 
the ultimate and for us unknowable reality of things. 
Their value — or the value of any work of art which 
the foreconscious has contrived — abides wholly in 

^ Streeter and Appaaamy: "The Sadhu, a Study in Mysticism 
and Practical Religion," Pt. V. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 131 

the content: the quality of the material thus worked 
up. The rich nature, the purified love, capable of 
the highest correspondences, will express even In 
the most primitive duologue or vision the results 
of a veritable touching and tasting* of Eternal Life. 
Its psychic structures — however logic may seek to 
discredit them — will convey spiritual fact, have the 
quality which the mystics mean when they speak of 
illumination. The emotional pietist will merely 
ramble among the religious symbols and phrases 
with which the devout memory is stored. It is true 
that the voice or the picture, surging up as it does 
into the field of consciousness, seems to both classes 
to have the character of a revelation. The pictures 
unroll themselves automatically and with amazing 
authority and clearness, the conversation is with 
Another than ourselves; or in more generalized ex- 
periences, such as the sense of the Divine Presence, 
the contact is with another order of life. But the 
crucial question which religion asks must be, does 
fresh life flow in from those visions and contacts, 
that intercourse? Is transcendental feeling involved 
in them? *'What fruits dost thou bring back from 
this thy vision?" says Jacopone da Todi; ^ and this 
remains the only real test by which to separate day- 
dreams from the vitalizing act of contemplation. 
In the first we are abandoned to a delightful, and 
perhaps as it seems holy or edifying vagrancy of 

^ Que frutti reducene de esta tua visione? 
Vita ordinata en onne nazione. 

— Jacopone da Todi: Lauda 79. 



132 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

thought. In the second, by a deliberate choice and 
act of will, foreconsclous thinking is set going and 
directed' towards an assigned end: the apprehending 
and actualizing of our deepest intuition of God. In 
it, a great region of the mind usually ignored by 
us and left to chance, yet source of many choices 
and deeds, and capable of much purifying pain, is 
put to its true work: and It is work which must be 
humbly, regularly and faithfully performed. It Is 
to this region that poetry, art and music — and even, 
if I dare say so, philosophy — make their fundamen- 
tal appeal. No life Is whole and harmonized in 
which It has not taken its right place. 

We must now go on — and indeed, any psychologi- 
cal study of prayerful experience must lead us on 
— to the subject of suggestion, and its relation to 
the inner life. By suggestion of course is here 
meant, in conformity with current psychological 
doctrine, the process by which an idea enters the 
deeper and unconscious psychic levels and there be- 
comes fruitful. Its real nature, and in consequence 
something of its far-reaching importance, is now be- 
ginning to be understood by us: a fact of great mo- 
ment for both the study and the practice of the 
spiritual life. Since the transforming work of the 
Spirit must be done through man's ordinary psychic 
machinery and in conformity with the laws which 
govern it, every such increase in our knowledge of 
that machinery must serve the Interests of religion, 
and show its teachers the way to success. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 133 

Suggestion is usually said to be of two kinds. 
The first is hetero-suggestion, in which the self- 
realizing idea is received either wittingly or un- 
wittingly from the outer world. During the whole 
of our conscious lives for good or evil we are at 
the mercy of such hetero-suggestions, which are be- 
ing made to us at every moment by our environ- 
ment; and they form, as we shall afterwards see, 
a dominant factor in corporate religious exercises. 
The second type is auto-suggestion. In this, by 
means of the conscious mind, an idea is implanted 
in the unconscious and, there left to mature. Thus 
do willingly accepted beliefs, religious, social, or 
scientific, gradually and silently permeate the whole 
being and show their results in character. 

A little reflection shows, however, that these two 
forms of suggestion shade Into one another; and 
that no hetero-suggestion, however impressively 
given, becomes active in us until we have in some 
sort accepted it and transformed it into an auto- 
suggestion. Theology expresses this fact in its 
own special language, when it says that the will 
must co-operate with grace if it is to be efficacious. 
Thus the primacy of the will is safe-guarded. It 
stands, or should stand, at the door; selecting from 
among the countless dynamic suggestions, good and 
bad, which hfe pours in on us, those which serve the 
best interests of the self. 

As a rule, men take little trouble to sort out the 
incoming suggestions. They allow uncrltlclzed be- 



134 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

liefs and prejudices, the ideas of hatred, anxiety or 
ill-health, free entrance. They fail to seize and 
affirm the ideas of power, renovation, joy. They 
would be more careful, did they grasp more fully 
the immense and often enduring effect of these ac- 
cepted suggestions; the extent in which the fun- 
damental, unreasoning psychic deeps are plastic to 
ideas. Yet this plasticity is exhibited in daily life 
first under the emotional form of sympathy, re- 
sponse to the suggestion of other peoples' feeling- 
states; and next under the conative form of imita- 
tion, active acceptance of the suggestion made by 
their appearance, habits, deeds. All political 
creeds, panics, fashion and good form witness to 
the overwhelming power of suggestion. We are 
so accustomed to this psychic contagion that we fail 
to realize the strangeness of the process: but it 
is now known to reach a degree previously un- 
suspected, and of which we have not yet found 
the limits. 

In the religious sphere, the more sensational 
demonstrations of this psychic suggestibility have 
long been notorious. Obvious instances arc those 
ecstatics — some of them true saints, some only re- 
ligious invalids — whose continuous and ardent med- 
itation on the Cross produced in them the actual 
bodily marks of the Passion of Christ. In less ex- 
treme types, perpetual dwelling on this subject, to- 
gether with that eager emotional desire to be united 
with the sufferings of the Redeemer which mediaeval 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 135 

religion encouraged, frequently modified the whole 
life of the contemplative ; shaping the plastic mind, 
and often the body too, to its own mould. A good 
historic example of this law of religious suggesti- 
bility is the case of Julian of Norwich. As a 
young girl, Julian prayed that she might have an 
illness at thirty years of age, and also a closer 
knowledge of Christ's pains. She forgot the 
prayer: but it worked below the threshold as for- 
gotten suggestions often do, and when she was thirty 
the illness came. Its psychic origin can still be rec- 
ognized in her own candid account of it; and with 
the illness the other half of that dynamic prayer re- 
ceived fulfilment, in those well-known visions of the 
Passion to which we owe the "Revelations of 
Divine Love." ^ 

This is simply a striking instance of a process 
which is always taking place in every one of us, for 
good or evil. The deeper mind opens to all who 
knock; provided only that the new-comers be not 
the enemies of some stronger habit or impression 
already within. To suggestions which coincide 
with the self's desires or established beliefs it gives 
an easy welcome; and these, once within, always 
tend to self-realization. Thus the French Carmel- 
ite Therese de I'Enfant-Jesus, once convinced that 
she was destined to be a "victim of love," began 
that career of suffering which ended in her death 

1 Julian of Norwich: "Revelations of Divine Love," Caps. 2, 3, 
4- 



136 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

at the age of twenty-four. ^ The lives of the 
Saints are full of incidents explicable on the same 
lines: exhibiting again and again the dramatic reali- 
zation of traditional ideas or passionate desires. 
We see therefore that St. Paul's admonition 
^Whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things 
are lovely, whatsoever things be of good report, 
think on these things" is a piece of practical ad- 
vice of which the importance can hardly be exag- 
gerated; for it deals with the conditions under which 
man makes his own mentality. 

Suggestion, in fact, is one of the most powerful 
agents either of self-destruction or of self-advance- 
ment which are within our grasp: and those who 
speak of the results of psycho-therapy, or the cer- 
titudes of religious experience, as "mere suggestion'^ 
are unfortunate in their choice of an adjective. If 
then we wish to explore all those mental resources 
which can be turned to the purposes of the spiritual 
life, this is one which we must not neglect. The 
religious idea, rightly received into the mind and 
reinforced by the suggestion of regular devotional 
exercises, always tends to realize itself. "Receive 
His leaven," says William Penn, "and it will change 
thee, His medicine and it will cure thee. He is as 
infallible as free; without money and with certainty. 
Yield up the body, soul and spirit to Him that 
maketh all things new: new heaven and new earth, 
new love, new joy, new peace, new works, a new 

1 "Soeur Therese de I'Enfant-Jesus," Cap. 8. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 137 

life and conversation." ^ This Is fine literature, 
but it is more important to us to realize that it Is 
also good psychology: and that here we are given 
the key to those amazing regenerations of character 
which are the romance and glory of the religious 
life. Pascal's too celebrated saying, that if you 
will take holy water regularly you will presently be- 
lieve, witnesses on another level to the same truth. 
Fears have been expressed that, by such an appli- 
cation of the laws of suggestion to religious experi- 
ence, we shall reduce religion itself to a mere favour- 
able subjectivism, and identify faith with suggesti- 
bility. But here the bearing of this series of facts 
on bodily health provides us with a useful analogy. 
Bodily health is no illusion. It does not consist in 
merely thinking that we are well, but is a real condi- 
tion of well-being and of power; depending on the 
state of our tissues and correct balance and working 
of our physical and psychical life. And this correct 
and wholesome working will be furthered and 
steadied — or if broken may often be restored — ^by 
good suggestions, it may be disturbed by bad sug- 
gestions; because the controlling factor of life is 
mind, not chemistry, and mind Is plastic to ideas. So 
too the life of the Spirit is a concrete fact; a real 
response to a real universe. But this concrete life 
of faith, with its growth and its experiences, its 
richly various working of one principle in every as- 
pect of existence, its correspondences with the Eter- 

A William Penn; "No Cross, No Crown." 



138 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

nal World, its definitely ontological references, is 
lived here and now; in and through the self's psychic 
life, and indeed his bodily life too — a truth which 
is embodied in sacramentalism. Therefore, shar- 
ing as it does life's plastic character, it too is ame- 
nable to suggestion and can be helped or hindered by 
it. It is indeed characteristic of those in whom 
this life is dominant, that they are capable of re- 
ceiving and responding to the highest and most 
vivifying suggestions which the universe in its total- 
ity pours in on us. This movement of response, 
often quietly overlooked, is that which makes them 
not spiritual hedonists but men and women of 
prayer. Grace — to give these suggestions of Spirit 
their conventional name — is perpetually beating in 
on us. But if it is to be inwardly realized, the 
Divine suggestion must be transformed by man's will 
and love into an auto-suggestion; and this is what 
seems to happen in meditation and prayer. 

Everything indeed points to a very close connec- 
tion between what might be called the mechanism 
of prayer and of suggestion. To say this, is in no 
way to minimize the transcendental character of 
prayer. In both states there is a spontaneous or 
deliberate throwing open of the deeper mind to in- 
fluences which, fully accepted, tend to realize them- 
selves. Look at the directions given by all great 
teachers of prayer and contemplation; and these 
two acts, r^ightly performed, fuse one with the 
other, they are two aspects of the single act of com- 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 139 

munion with Obd. Look at their insistence on a 
stilling and recollecting of the mind, on surrender, 
a held passivity not merely limp but purposeful : on 
the need of meek yielding to a greater inflowing 
power, and its regenerating suggestions. Then 
compare this with the method by which health-giv- 
ing suggestions are made to the bodily life. "In 
the deeps: of the soul His word is spoken." Is not 
this an exact description of the inward work of the 
self-realizing idea of holiness, received in the prayer 
of quiet into the unconscious mind, and there ex- 
perienced as a transforming power? I think that 
we may go even further than this, and say that grace, 
is, in effect, the direct suggestion of the spiritual 
affecting our souPs life. As we are commonly docile 
to the countless hetero-suggestions, some of them 
helpful, some weakening, some actually perverting, 
which our environment is always making to us; so 
we can and should be so spiritually suggestible that 
we can receive those given to us by all-penetra- 
ting Divine life. What is generally called sin, es- 
pecially In the forms of self-sufficiency, lack of char- 
ity and the indulgence of the senses, renders us re- 
calcitrant to these living suggestions of the Spirit. 
The opposing qualities, humility, love and purity, 
make us as we say accessible to grace. 

"Son," says the inward voice to Thomas a Kem- 
pls, "My gra:ce is precious, and suffereth not itself 
to be mingled with strange things nor earthly conso- 
lations. Wherefore it behoveth thee to cast away 



140 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

impediments to grace, if thou wiliest to receive the 
inpouring thereof. Ask for thyself a secret place, 
love to dwell alone with thyself, seek confabulation 
of none other . . . put the readiness for God be- 
fore all other things, for thou canst not both take 
heed to Me and delight in things transitory. . . . 
This grace is a light supernatural and a special gift 
of God, and a proper sign of the chosen children of 
God, and the earnest of everlasting health; for God 
lifteth up man from earthly things to love heavenly 
things, and of him that is fleshly maketh a spiritual 
man." ^ Could we have a more vivid picture than 
this of the conditions of withdrawal and attention 
under which the psyche is most amenable to sugges- 
tion, or of the inward transfiguration worked by a 
great self-realizing idea? Such transfiguration has 
literally on the physical plane caused the blind to 
see, the deaf to hear, the dumb to speak: and it 
seems to me that it is to be observed operating on 
highest levels in the work of salvation. When fur- 
ther a Kempis prays "Increase in me more grace, 
that I may fulfil Thy word and make perfect mine 
own health" is he not describing the right balance to 
be sought between our surrender to the vivifying 
suggestions of grace and our appropriation and 
manly use of them? This is no limp acquiescence 
and merely infantile dependence, but another aspect 
of the vital balance between the indrawing and out- 
giving of power: and one of the main functions of 

1 De Imit. Christ!, Bk. Ill, Cap. 58. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 141 

prayer is to promote in us that spiritually suggest- 
ible state in which, as Dionysius the Areopagite says, 
we are "receptive of God." 

It is, then, worth our while from the point of view 
of the spiritual life to inquire into the conditions in 
which a suggestion is most likely to be received and 
realized by us. These conditions, as psychologists 
have so far defined them, can be resumed under the 
three heads of quiescence, attention and feeling: 
outstanding characteristics, as I need not point out, 
of the state of prayer, all of which can be illustrated 
from the teaching and experience of the mystics. 

First, let us take Quiescence. In order fully to 
lay open the unconscious to the influence of sug- 
gested ideas, the surface mind must be called in from 
its responses to the outer world, or in religious lan- 
guage recollected, till the hum of that world is 
hardly perceived by it. The body must be relaxed, 
making no demands on the machinery controlling 
the motor system; and the conditions in general 
must be those of complete mental and bodily rest. 
Here is the psychological equivalent of that which 
spiritual writers call the Quiet: a state defined by 
one of them as "a rest most busy." "Those who 
are in this prayer," says St. Teresa, "wish their 
bodies to remain motionless, for it seems to them 
that at the least movement they will lose their sweet 
peace." ^ Others say that in this state we "stop 
the wheel of imagination," leave all that we can 

1 "Way of Perfection," Cap. 33. 



142 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

think, sink Into our nothingness or our ground. In 
Ruysbroek's phrase, we are ^'inwardly abiding In 
simplicity and stillness and utter peace" ; ^ and this Is 
man's state of maximum receptivity. "The best 
and noblest way in which thou mayst come into this 
work and life," says Meister Eckhart, "Is by keeping 
silence and letting God work and speak . . . when 
we simply keep ourselves receptive we are more per- 
fect than when at work." ^ 

But this preparatory state of surrendered quiet 
must at once be qualified by the second point: 
Attention. It Is based upon the right use of the 
will, and is not a limp yielding to anything or noth- 
ing. It has an ordained deliberate aim, is a be- 
haviour-cycle directed to an end; and this it is that 
marks out the real and fruitful quiet of the contem- 
plative from the non-directed surrender of mere 
quietism. "Nothing," says St. Teresa, "is learnt 
without a little pains. For the love of God, sisters, 
account that care well employed that ye shall bestow 
on this thing." ^ 

The quieted mind must receive and hold, yet with- 
out discursive thought, the Idea which It desires to 
realize; and this idea must Interest and be real for 
it, so that attention is concentrated on it sponta- 
neously. The more completely the Idea absorbs us, 
the greater its transforming power: when Interest 
wavers, the suggestion begins to lose ground. In 

1 "The Book of the XII Beguines," Cap. 7. 

- Meister Eckhart, Pred. I. 

8 "The Way of Perfection," Cap. 29. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 143 

spite of her subsequent relapse into quietism 
Madame Guyon accurately described true quiet 
when she said, "Our activity should consist in en- 
deavouring to acquire and maintain such a state as 
may be most susceptible of divine impressions, most 
flexile to all the operations of the Eternal Word." ^ 
Such concentration can be improved by practice; 
hence the value of regular meditation and contem- 
plation to those who are in earnest about the spir- 
itual life, the quiet and steady holding in the mind of 
the thought which it is desired to realize. 

Psycho-therapists tell us that, having achieved 
quiescence, we should rapidly and rythmically, but 
with intention, repeat the suggestion that we wish 
to realize; and that the shorter, simpler and more 
general this verbal formula, the more effective it 
will be.^ The spiritual aspect of this law was well 
understood by the mediaeval mystics. Thus the 
author of "The Cloud of Unknowing" says to his 
disciple, "Fill thy spirit with ghostly meaning of 
this word Sin, and without any special beholding 
unto any kind of sin, whether it be venial or deadly. 
And cry thus ghostly ever upon one : Sin ! Sin I Sin ! 
out! out! out! This ghostly cry is better learned 
of God by the proof than of any man by word. For 
it is best when it is in pure spirit, without special 
thought or any pronouncing of word. On the same 
manner shalt thou do with this little word God: and 
mean God all, and all God, so that nought work in 

i"A Short and Easy Method of Prayer," Cap. 21. 

2 Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Ft. II, Cap 6. 



144 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

thy wit and In thy will but only God." ^ Here the 
directions are exact, and such as any psychologist of 
the present day might give. So too, religious 
teachers informed by experience have always as- 
cribed a special efficacy to "short acts" of prayer and 
aspiration: phrases repeated or held in the mind, 
which sum up and express the self's penitence, love, 
faith or adoration, and are really brief, articulate 
suggestions parallel in type to those which Bau- 
douin recommends to us as conducive to bodily well- 
being.- The repeated affirmation of Julian of Nor- 
wich "All shall be well! all shall be well I all shall 
be well! "^ fills all her revelations with Its sugges- 
tion of joyous faith; and countless generations of 
Christians have thus applied to their soul's health 
those very methods by which we arc now enthusias- 
tically curing indigestion and cold in the head. The 
articulate repetition of such phrases increases their 
suggestive power; for the unconscious is most easily 
reached by way of the ear. This fact throws light 
on the immemorial insistence of all great religions 
ott the peculiar value of vocal prayer, whether this 
be the mantra of the Hindu or the dikr of the Mos- 
lem; and explains the instinct which causes the 
Catholic Church to require from her priests the ver- 
bal repetition, not merely the silent reading of their 
daily office. Hence, too, there Is real educative 
value in such devotions as the rosary; and the Pro- 

1 Op. cit. Cap. 40. 

2Baudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," loc. cit. 

3 "Revelations of Divine Love," Cap. 27. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 145 

testant Churches showed little psychological Insight 
when they abandoned it. Such "vain" repetitions, 
however much the rational mind may dislike, dis- 
credit or denounce them, have power to penetrate 
and modify the deeper psychic levels; always pro- 
vided that they conflict with no accepted belief, are 
weighted with meaning and desire, with the Intent 
stretched towards God, and are not allowed to be- 
come merely mechanical — the standing danger alike 
of all verbal suggestion and all vocal prayer. 

Here we touch the third character of effective 
suggestion: Feeling. When the idea Is charged 
with emotion, It Is far more likely to be realized. 
War neuroses have taught us the dreadful potency 
of the emotional stimulus of fear; but this power 
of feeling over the unconscious has Its good side 
too. Here we find psychology justifying the often 
criticized emotional element of religion. Its func- 
tion Is to increase the energy of the idea. The cool, 
judicious type of belief will never possess the life- 
changing power of a more fervid, though perhaps 
less rational faith. Thus the state of corporate 
suggestibility generated In a revival and on which 
the success of that revival depends, is closely related 
to the emotional character of the appeal which Is 
made. And, on higher levels, we see that the trans- 
figured lives and heroic energies of the great figures 
of Christian history all represent the realization of 
an idea of which the heart was an Impassioned love 
of God, subduing to its purposes all the impulses 



146 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

and powers of the inner man. "If you would truly 
know how these things come to pass," said St. Bon- 
aventura, "ask it of desire not of Intellect; of the 
ardours of prayer, not of the teaching of the 
schools." ^ More and more psychology tends to en- 
dorse the truth of these words. 

Quiescence, attention, and emotional interest are 
then the conditions of successful suggestion. We 
have further to notice two characteristics whlc^h have 
been described by the Nancy school of psychologists; 
and which are of some importance for those who 
wish to understand the mechanism of religious ex- 
perience. These have been called the law of Un- 
conscious Teleology, and the law of Reversed 
Effort. 

The law of unconscious teleology means that 
when an end has been effectively suggested to it, the 
unconscious mind will always tend to work towards 
Its realization. Thus in psycho-therapeutics it is 
found that a general suggestion of good health made 
to the sick person is often enough. The doctor may 
not himself know enough about the! malady to sug- 
gest stage by stage the process of cure. But he 
suggests that cure; and the necessary changes and 
adjustments required for its realization are made 
unconsciously, under the Influence of the dynamic 
idea. Here the direction of "The Cloud of Un- 
knowing," "Look that nothing live in thy working 
mind but a naked intent directed to God" ^ — suggest- 

1 "De Itinerario Mentis in Deo," Cap. 7. 

2 Op. cit., Cap. 43. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 147 

ing as It does to the psyche the ontological Object of 
faith — strikingly anticipates the last conclusions of 
science. Further, a fervent belief In the end pro- 
posed, a conviction of success, Is by no means essen- 
tial. Far more important is a humble willingness 
to try the method, give It a chance. That which 
reason may not grasp, the deeper mind may seize 
upon and realize ; always provided that the Intellect 
does not set up resistances. This Is found to be 
true In medical practice, and religious teachers have 
always declared it to be true In the spiritual sphere ; 
holding obedience, humility, and a measure of resig- 
nation, not spiritual vision, to be the true requisites 
for the reception of grace, the healing and renova- 
tion of the soul. Thus acquiescence In belief, and 
loyal and steady co-operation In the corporate reli- 
gious life are often seen to work for good in those 
who submit to them; though these may lack, as they 
frequently say, the "spiritual sense." And this hap- 
pens, not by magic, but in conformity with psycho- 
logical law. 

This tendency of the unconscious self to realize 
without criticism a suggested end lays on religious 
teachers the obligation of forming a clear and vital 
conception of the spiritual ideals which they wish to 
suggest, whether to themselves in their meditations 
or to others by their teaching: to be sure that they 
are wholesome, and really tend to fullness of life. 
It should also compel each of us to scrutinize those 
religious thoughts and Images which we receive and 



14S THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

on which we allow our minds to dwell: excluding 
those that are merely sentimental, weak or other- 
wise unworthy, and holding fast the noblest and 
most beautiful that we can find. For these ideas, 
however generalized, will set up profound changes 
in the mind that receives them. Thus the wrong 
conception of self-immolation will be faithfully 
worked out by the unconscious — and has been too 
often in the past — in terms of misery, weakness, or 
disease. We remember how the idea of herself as 
a victim of love worked physical destruction in 
Thcrese de L' Enfant Jesus: and we shall never per- 
haps know all the havoc wrought by the once fashion- 
able doctrines of predestination and of the total de- 
pravity of human nature. All this shows how neces- 
sary it is to put hopeful, manly, constructive concep- 
tions before those whom we try to help or instruct; 
constantly suggesting to them not the weak and 
sinful things that they are, but the living and radiant 
things which they can become. 

Further, this tendency of the received suggestion 
to work out its whole content for good or evil within 
the unconscious mind, shows the importance which 
we ought to attach to the tone of a religious service, 
and how close too many of our popular hymns are 
to what one might call psychological sin; stressing 
as they do a childish weakness and love of shelter 
and petting, a neurotic shrinking from full human 
life, a morbid preoccupation with failure and guilt. 
Such hymns make devitalizing suggestions, adverse 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 149 

to the health and energy of the spiritual life; and 
are all the more powerful because they are sung col- 
lectively and in rhythm, and are cast in an emotional 
mould.^ There was some truth in the accusation of 
the Indian teacher Ramakrishna, that the books of 
the Christians insisted too exclusively on sin. He 
said, "He who repeats again and again 'I am bound! 
I am bound!' remains in bondage. He who repeats 
day and night 'I am a sinner! I am a sinner!' be- 
comes a sinner indeed." ^ 

I go on to the law of Reversed Effort; a psycho- 
logical discovery which seems to be of extreme im- 
portance for the spiritual life. Briefly this means, 
that when any suggestion has entered the uncon- 
scious mind and there become active, all our con- 
scious and anxious resistances to it are not merely 
useless but actually tend to intensify it. If it is to 
be dislodged, this will not be accomplished by mere 
struggle but by the persuasive power of another and 
superior auto-suggestion. Further, in respect of 
any habit that we seek to establish, the more desper- 
ate our struggle and sense of effort, the smaller will 
be our success. In small matters we have all ex- 
perienced the working of this law: in frustrated 
struggles to attend to that which 'does not interest 

1 Hymns of the Weary Willie type: e.g. 

"O Paradise, O Paradise 
Who does not sigh for rest?" 
should never be sung in congregations where the average age is 
less than sixty. Equally unsuited to general use are those ex- 
pressing disillusionment, anxiety, or impotence. Any popular 
hymnal will provide an abundance of examples. 

2 Quoted by Pratt: "The Religious Consciousness," Cap. 7. 



150 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

us, to check a tiresome cough, to keep our balance 
when learning to ride a bicycle. But It has also 
more important applications. Thus it Indicates 
that a deliberate struggle to believe, to overcome 
some moral weakness, to keep attention fixed In 
prayer, will tend to frustration: for this* anxious 
effort gives body to our imaginative difficulties and 
sense of helplessness, fixing attention on the conflict, 
not on the desired end. True, if this end Is to be 
achieved the will must be directed to it, but only In 
the sense of giving steadfast direction to the desires 
and acts of the self, keeping attention orientated 
towards the goal. The pull of imaginative desire, 
not the push of desperate effort, serves us best. 
St. Teresa well appreciated this law and applied It 
to her doctrine of prayer. "If your thought," she 
says to her daughters, "runs after all the fooleries 
of the world, laugh at it and leave it for a fool and 
continue in your quiet ... If you seek by force of 
arms to bring it to you, you lose the strength which 
you have against it." ^ 

This same principle is implicitly recognized by 
those theologians who declare that man can "do 
nothing of himself," that mere voluntary struggle 
Is useless, and regeneration comes by surrender to 
grace: by yielding, that Is, to the Inner urge, to 
those sources of power which flow In, but are not 
dragged in. Indications of Its truth meet us every- 
where in spiritual literature. Thus Jacob Boehm.e 

i"The Way of Perfection," Cap. 31. 



PSYCHOLOGY AND THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 151 

says, ''Because thou strlvest against that out of which 
thou art come, thou breakest thyself off with thy 
own willing from God's willing." ^ So too the con- 
stant invitations to let God work and speak, to sur- 
render, are all invitations to cease anxious strife and 
effort and give the Divine suggestions their chance. 
The law of reversed effort, in fact, is valid on every 
level of life; and warns us against the error of mak- 
ing religion too grim and strenuous an affair. Cer- 
tainly in all life of the Spirit the will is active, and 
must retain its conscious and steadfast orientation 
to God. Heroic activity and moral effort must 
form an integral part of full human experience. 
Yet it is clearly possible to make too much of the 
process of wrestling evil. An attention chiefly 
and anxiously concentrated on the struggle with sins 
and weaknesses, instead of on the eternal sources of 
happines.s and power, will offer the unconscious harm- 
ful suggestions of Impotence and hence tend to 
frustration. The early ascetics, who made elabor- 
ate preparations for dealing with temptations, got 
as an inevitable result plenty of temptations With 
which to deal. A sounder method is taught by the 
mystics. "When thoughts of sin press on thee," 
says "The Cloud of Unknowing," "look over their 
shoulders seeking another thing, the which thing 
is God." 2 

These laws of suggestion, taken together, all seem 

1 "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV. 

2 Op. cit., Cap. 32. 



152 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

to point one way. They exhibit the human self as 
living, plastic, changeful; perpetually modified by 
the suggestions pouring in on It, the experiences 
and intuitions to which it reacts. Every thought, 
prayer, enthusiasm, fear, is of importance to it. 
Nothing leaves It as it was before. The soul, said 
Boehme, stands both In heaven and In hell. Keep 
it perpetually busy at the window of the senses, feed 
it with unlovely and materialistic ideas, and those 
ideas will realize themselves. Give the contem- 
plative faculty its chance, let it breathe at least for 
a few moments of each day the spiritual atmos- 
phere of faith, hope and love, and the spiritual life 
will at least in some measure be realized by it. 



CHAPTER V 

INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION AND THE LIFE OF 
THE SPIRIT 

So far, In considering what psychology had to tell 
us about the conditions In which our spiritual life 
can develop, and the mental machinery It can use, 
we have been, deliberately, looking at men one by 
one. We have left on one side all those questfons 
which relate to the corporate aspect of the spiritual 
life, and its expression In religious Institutions; 
that Is to say. In churches and cults. We have 
looked upon it as a personal growth and response; 
a personal reception of, and self-orientation to. 
Reality. But we cannot get away from the fact 
that this regenerate life does most frequently appear 
in history associated with, or creating for Itself, a 
special kind of institution. Although it is impos- 
sible to look upon it as the appearance of a favour- 
able variation within the species, it is also just as 
possible to look upon It as the formation of a new 
herd or tribe. Where the variation appears, and 
in its sense of newness, youth and vigour breaks 
away from the institution within which It has arisen, 
it generally becomes the nucleus about which a new 
group is formed. So that individualism and gre- 

153 



154 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

gariousness are both represented in the full life 
of the Spirit; and however personal its achievement 
may seem to us, it has also a definitely corporate and 
institutional aspect. 

I now propose to take up this side of the subject, 
and try to suggest one or two lines of thought which 
may help us to discover the meaning and worth of 
such societies and institutions. For after all, some 
explanation is needed of these often strange 
symbolic systems, and often rigid mechani- 
zations, imposed on the fre^ responses to Eternal 
Reality which we found to constitute the essence 
of religious experience. Any one who has known 
even such direct communion with the Spirit as is pos- 
sible to normal human nature must, if he thinks out 
the implications of his own experience, feel it to 
be inconsistent that this most universal of all acts 
should be associated by men with the most exclusive 
of all types of institution. It is only because we are 
so accustomed to this — taking churches for granted, 
even when we reject them — that we do not s^e how 
odd they really are: how curious it is that men do 
not set up exclusive and mutually hostile clubs full 
of rules and regulations to enjoy the light of the sun 
in particular times and fashions, but do persistently 
set up such exclusives clubs full of rules and regula- 
tions, so to enjoy the free Spirit of God. 

When we look into history we see the life of the 
Spirit, even from its crudest beginnings, closely 
associated with two movements. First with the ten- 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 155 

dency to organize It in communities or churches, liv- 
ing under special sanctions and rules. Next, with 
the tendency of its greatest, most arresting person- 
alities either to revolt from these organisms or to 
reform, rekindle them from within. So that the in- 
stitutional life of religion persists through or in spite 
of its own constant tendency to stiffen and lose fer- 
vour, and the secessions, protests, or renewals which 
are occasioned by its greatest sons. Thus our 
Lord protested against Jewish formalism; many 
Catholic mystics, and afterwards the best of the Pro- 
testant reformers, against Roman formalism; 
George Fox against one type of Protestant formal- 
Ism; the Oxford movement against another. This 
constant antagonism of church and prophet, of insti- 
tutional authority and Individual vision, is not only 
true of Christianity but of all great historical faiths. 
In the middle ages Kablr and Nanak, and In our own 
times the leaders of the Brahmo Samaj, break away 
from and denounce ceremonial Hinduism: again 
and again the great Sufis have led reforms within 
Islam, That which we are now Concerned to dis- 
cover Is the necessity underlying this conflict: the 
extent in which the institution on one hand serves 
the spiritual life, and on the other cramps or opposes 
its free development. It Is a truism that all such 
institutions tend to degenerate, to become me- 
chanical, and to tyrannize. Are they then, in spite 
of these adverse characters, to be looked on as es- 
sential, inevitable, or merely desirable expressions 



156 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

of the spiritual life In man; or can this spiritual life 
flourish In pure freedom? 

This question, often put In the crucial form, "Did 
Jesus Christ Intend to form a Church?" is well 
worth asking. Indeed, It is of great pressing im- 
portance to those who now have the spiritual recon- 
struction of society at heart. It means, in practice: 
can men best be saved, regenerated, one by one, by 
their direct responses to the action of the Spirit; or, 
Is the life of the Spirit best found and actualized 
through submission to tradition and contacts with 
other men — that Is, in a group or church? And If 
in a group or church, what should the character of 
this society be? But we shall make no real move- 
ment towards solving this problem, unless we aban- 
don both the standpoint of authority, and that of 
naive religious individualism; and consent to look at 
it as a part of the general problem of human society, 
In the light of history, of psychology, and of ethics. 

I think we may say without exaggeration that the 
general modern judgment — not, of course, the 
clerical or orthodox judgment — Is adverse to In- 
stltutionallsm; at least as it now exists. In spite 
of the enormous improvement which would certainly 
be visible, were we to compare the average ecclesi- 
astical attitude and average Church service in this 
country with those of a hundred years ago, the sense 
that religion involves submission to the rules and 
discipline of a closed soclet)^ — that definite spiritual 
gains are attached to spiritual incorporation — that 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 157 

church-going, formal and corporate worship, is a 
normal and necessary part of the routine of a good 
life: all this has certainly ceased to be general 
amongst us. If we include the whole population, 
and not the pious fraction in our view, this is true 
both of so-called Catholic and so-called Protestant 
countries. Professor Pratt has lately described 
80 per cent, of the population of the United States 
as being "unchurched"; and all who worked among 
our soldiers at the front were struck by the para- 
dox of the immense amount of natural religion exist- 
ing among them, combined with almost total aliena- 
tion from religious institutions. Those, too, who 
study and care for the spiritual life seem most often 
to conceive It In the terms of William James's well- 
known definition of religion as "the feelings, acts and 
experiences of individual men in their solitude, so 
far as they apprehend themselves to stand in rela- 
tion to whatever they may consider the Divine." ^ 

Such a life of the Spirit — and the majority of ed- 
ucated men would probably accept this description 
of it — seems little if at all conditioned by Church 
membership. It speaks in secret to its Father in 
secret; and private devotion and self-discipline seem 
to be all it needs. Yet looking at history, we see 
that this conception, this completeness of emphasis 
on first-hand solitary seeking, this one-by-one achieve- 
ment of Eternity, has not in fact proved t'ruly fruit- 

1 William James: "The Varieties of Religious Experience," p. 
31. 



158 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

ful in the past. Where It seems so to be fruitful, 
the solitude Is Illusory. Each great regenerator 
and revealer of Reality, each God-Intoxicated soul 
achieving transcendence, owes something to Its 
predecessors and contemporaries.^ All great spir- 
itual achievement, like all great artlstl'c achievement, 
however spontaneous It may seem to be, however 
much the fruit of a personal love and vision, is 
firmly rooted in the racial past. It fulfills rather 
than destroys; and unless Its free movement towards 
novelty, fresh levels of pure experience, be thus bal- 
anced by the stability which is given us by our 
hoarded traditions and formed habits, it will degen- 
erate into eccentricity and fail of its full effect. Al- 
though nothing but first-hand discovery of and re- 
sponse to spiritual values is in the end of any use to 
us, that discovery and that response are never quite 
such a single-handed affair as we like to suppose. 
Memory and environment, natural and cultural, play 
their part. And the next most natural and fruitful 
movement after such a personal discovery of abiding 
Reality, such a transfiguration of life. Is always back 
towards our fellow-men; to learn more from them, 
to unite with them, to help them — anyhow to re- 
affirm our solidarity with them. The great men 
and women of the Spirit, then, either use their new 
power and joy to restore existing institutions to fuller 
vitality, as did the successive regenerators of the 

1 On this point compare Von Hiigel: 'Essays and Addresses on 
the Philosophy of Religion," pp. 230 et seq. 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 159 

monastic life, such as St. Bernard and St. Teresa 
and many Sufi saints ; or they form new groups, new 
organisms which they can animate, as did St. Paul, 
St. Francis, Kabir, Fox, Wesley, Booth. One and 
all, they feel that the full robust life of the Spirit de- 
mands some incarnation, some place in history and 
social outlet, and also some fixed discipline and tradi- 
tion. 

In fact, not only the history of the soul, but that of 
all full human achievement, as studied in great crea- 
tive personalities, shows us that such achievement 
has always two sides. ( i ) There is the solitary 
vision or revelation, and personal work in accordance 
with that vision. The religious man's direct experi- 
ence of God and his effort to correspond with it; 
the artist's lonely and intense apprehension of 
beauty, and hard translation of it; the poet's dream 
and its difficult expression in speech; the philoso- 
pher's intuition of reality, hammered into thought. 
These are personal immediate experiences, and no 
human soul will reach its full stature unless it can 
have the measure of freedom and withdrawal which 
they demand. But (2) there are the social and 
historical contacts which are made by all these crea- 
tive types with the past and with the present; all the 
big rich thick stream of human history and effort, 
giving them, however little they may recognize it, 
the very initial concepts with which they go to their 
special contact with reality, and which colour it; 
supporting them and demanding from them again 



160 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

their contribution to the racial treasury, and to the 
present too. Thus the artist, as well as his solitary 
hours of c'ontcmphition and effort, ought to have his 
times alike of humble study of the past and of in- 
tercourse with other living artists; and great and en- 
during art forms more often arise within a school, 
than in complete independence of tradition. It 
seems, then, that the advocates of corporate and 
personal religion are both, in a measure, right: and 
that once again a middle p'ath, avoiding both ex- 
tremes of simplification, keeps nearest to the facts 
of life. We have no reason for supposing that 
these principles, which history shows us, have ceased 
to be operative: or that we can secure the best kind 
of spiritual progress for the race by breaking with 
the past and the institutions in which it is conserved. 
Institutions are in some sort needful if life's balance 
between stability and novelty, and our links with 
history and our fellowmen, are to be preserved; and 
if we are to achieve such a fullness both of individ- 
ual and of corporate life on highest levels as his- 
tory and psycholog\^ recommend to us. 

The question of this institutional side of religion 
and what we should demand from it falls into two 
parts, which will best be treated separately. First, 
that which concerns the character and usefulness of 
the group-organization or society: the Church. 
Secondly, that which relates to its peculiar practices: 
the Cult. We must enquire under each head what 
are their necessary characters, their essential gifts 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 161 

to the soul, and what their dangers and limita- 
tions. 

First, then, the Church. What does a Church 
really do for the God-desiring individual; the soul 
that wants to live a full, complete and real life, 
which has "felt in its solitude" the presence and 
compulsion of Eternal Reality under one or other 
of the forms of religious experience? 

I think we can say that the Church or institution 
gives to Its loyal members : — 

( 1 ) Group-consciousness. 

(2) Religious union, not only with Its contem- 

poraries but with the race, that is with 
history. This we may regard as an ex- 
tension Into the past — and so an enrich- 
ment — of that group-consciousness. 

(3) 'Discipline; and with discipline a sort of 

spiritual grit, which carries our fluctuating 
souls past and over the inevitably recurring 
periods of slackness, and corrects subjecti- 
vism. 

(4) It gives Culture, handing on the discoveries 

of the saints. 
In so far as the free-lance gets any of these four 
things, he gets them ultimately, though Indirectly, 
from some institutional source. 

On the other hand the institution, since it repre- 
sents the element of stability in life, does not give, 
and must not be expected to give, direct spiritual 
experience; or any onward push towards novelty, 



162 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

freshness of discovery and Interpretation in. the 
spiritual sphere. Its dangers and limitations will 
abide in a certain dislike of such freshness of dis- 
covery; the tendency to exalt the corporate and 
stable and discount the mobile and individual. Its 
natural instinct will be for exclusivism, the club-idea, 
conservatism* and cosiness; it will, if left to itself, 
revel in the middle-aged atmosphere and exhibit 
the middle-aged point of view. 

We can now consider these points in greater de- 
tail: and first that of the religious group-conscious- 
ness which a church should give its members. This 
is of a special kind. It is axiomatic that group-or- 
ganization of some sort is a necessity of human 
life. History showed us the tendency of all spirit- 
ual movements to embody themselves, if not in 
churches at least In some group-form; the paradox 
of each successive revolt from a narrow or decadent 
instltutionalism forming a group in its turn, or 
perishing when its first fervour died. But this social 
impulse, these spontaneous group-formations of 
master and disciples, valuable though they may be, 
do not fully exhibit all that is meant or done by a 
church. True, the Church is or should be at each 
moment of its career such a living spiritual society 
or household of faith. It is, essentially, a commu- 
nity of persons, who have or should have a common 
sentiment — belief in, and reverence for, their God 
— and a common defined aim, the furtherance of 
the spiritual life under the special religious sane- 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 163 

tlons which they accept. But every sect, every re- 
ligious order or guild, every class-meeting, might 
claim this much; yet none of these can claim to be 
a church. 

A church is far more than this. In so far as it 
is truly alive, it is a real organism, as distinguished 
from a crowd or collection of persons with a com- 
mon purpose. It exhibits on the religious plane the 
ruling characters of such organized life: that is to 
say, the development of tradition and complex hab- 
its, the differentiation of function, the docility to 
leadership, the conservation of values, or carrying 
forward of the past Into the present. It is, like the 
State, embodied history; and as such lives with its 
own life, a life transcending and embracing that of 
the individual souls of which it is built. And here, 
in its combined social and historic character, lie the 
sources alike of its enormous importance for human 
life and of its inevitable defects. 

Professor McDougall, in his discussion of na- 
tional groups,^ has laid down the conditions which 
are necessary to the development of such a true 
organic group life as is seen in a living church. 
These are: first, continuity of existence, in- 
volving the development of a body of traditions, 
customs and practices — that is, for religion, a Cul- 
tus. Next, an authoritative organization through 
which custom and belief can be transmitted — that 
is, a Hierarchy, order of ministers, or its equivalent. 

1 W. McDougall : "The Group Mind," Cap. 3. 



164 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Third, a conscious common Interest, belief, or 
idea — Creed. Last, the existence of antagonistic 
groups or conditions, developing loyalty or keen- 
ness. These characters — continuity, authority, com- 
mon belief and loyalty — which are shown, as he 
says, In their completeness in a patriot army, are I 
think no less marked features of a living spiritual 
society. Plain examples are the primitive Chris- 
tian communities, the great religious orders in their 
flourishing time, the Society of Friends. They are 
on the whole more fully evident In the Catholic 
than in the Protestant type of church. But I think 
that we may look upon them, in some form or an- 
other, as essential to any Institutional framework 
which shall really help the spiritual life in man. 

We find ourselves, then, committed to the picture 
of a church or spiritual institution which Is in es- 
sence Liturgic, Ecclesiastical, Dogmatic, and Mili- 
tant, as best fulfilling the requirements of group 
psycholog)\ Four decidedly indigestible • morsels 
for the modern mind. Yet, group-feeling demands 
some common expression if it is to be lifted from 
notion to fact. Discipline requires some authority, 
and some devotion to it. Culture involves a tradi- 
tion handed on. And these, we said, were the chief 
gifts which the institution had to give to Its mem- 
bers. We may therefore keep them In mind, as 
representing actual values, and warning us that 
neither history nor psychology encourages the be- 
lief that an amiable fluidity serves the highest pur- 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 165 

poses of life. Some common practice and custom, 
keeping the Individual in line with the main ten- 
dencies of the group, providing rails on which, the 
instinctive life can run and machinery by which 
fruitful suggestions can be spread. Some real dis- 
cipline and humbling submission to rule. Some tra- 
ditional and theological standard. Some mission- 
ary effort and enthusiasm. For these four things 
we must find place in any incorporation of the spir- 
itual life which is to have its full effect upon the 
souls of men. And as a matter of fact, the pe- 
riodical revolts against churches and ecclesiastlcism, 
are never against societies in which all these char- 
acteristics are still alive: but against those which 
retain and exaggerate formal tradition and author- 
ity, whilst they have lost zest and identity of aim. 

A real Church has therefore something to give 
to, and something to demand from each of its 
members, and there is a genuine loss for man' in 
being unchurched. Because it endures through a 
perpetual process of discarding and renewal, those 
members will share the richness and experience of a 
spiritual life far exceeding their own time-span; a 
truth which is enshrined in the beautiful concep- 
tion of the Communion of Saints. They enter a 
group consciousness which reinforces their own In 
the extent to which they surrender to it; which sur- 
rounds them with favourable suggestions and gives 
the precision of habit to their instinct for Eternity. 
The special atmosphere, the hoarded beauty, tl:e 



166 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

evocative yet often archaic symbolism of a Gothic 
Cathedral, with Its constant reminiscences of past 
civilizations and old levels of culture, Its broken 
fragments and abandoned altars, Its conservation 
of eternal truths — the Intimate union in It of the 
sublime and homely, the successive and abiding as- 
pects of reality — make It the most fitting of all 
images of the Church, regarded as the spiritual In- 
stitution of humanity. And the perhaps undue con- 
servatism commonly associated with Cathedral 
circles represents too the chief reproach which can 
be brought against churches — their tendency to pre- 
serv^e stability at the expense of novelty, to crys- 
tallize, to cling to habits and customs which no 
longer serve a useful end. In this a church Is like 
a home; where old bits of furniture have a way 
of hanging on, and old habits, sometimes absurd, 
endure. Yet both the home and the church can 
give something which Is nowhere else obtainable by 
us, and represent values which It is perilous to Ig- 
nore. When once the historical character of re- 
ality Is fully grasped by us, we see that some such 
organization through which achieved values are con- 
served and carried forward, useful habits are 
learned and practised, the direct Intuitions of genius, 
the prophet's revelation of reality are interpreted 
and handed on, is essential to the spiritual conti- 
nuity of the race: and that definite churchmanship of 
some sort, or Its equivalent, must be a factor In 
the spiritual reconstruction of society. 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 167 

As, other things being equal, a baby benefits 
enormously by being born within the social frame- 
work rather than in the illusory freedom of "pure'' 
nature; so the growth of the soul is, or should be, 
helped and not hindered by the nurture it receives 
from the religious society in which it is born. Only 
indeed by attachment, open, or virtual, through life 
or through literature, to some such group can the 
new soul link itself with history, and so participate 
in the hoarded spiritual values of humanity. Thus 
even a general survey of life inclines us at least to 
some appreciation of the principle laid down by 
Baron von Hiigel in ^'Eternal Life" — namely, that 
*'souls who live an heroic spiritual life within great 
religious traditions and institutions, attain to a 
rare volume and vividness of religious insight, con- 
viction and reality" ^ — seldom within reach of the 
contemplative, however ardent, who walks by him- 
self. 

History has given one reason for this ; psychology 
gives another. These souls, living it is true with 
intensity their own life towards God, share and 
are ^bathed in the group consciousness of their 
church; as members of a family, distinct in tem- 
perament, share and are modified by the group con- 
sciousness of the home. The mental process of 
the individual is profoundly affected when he thus 
thinks and acts as a member of a group. Sugges- 
tibility is then enormously increased; and we know 

iVon Hugel "Eternal Life," p. 377. 



168 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIl 

how much suggestion means to us. Moreover, sug- 
gestions emanating from the group always take 
priority of those of the outside world: for man is 
a gregarious animal, intensely sensitive to the men- 
tality of the herd.^ The Mind of the Church is 
therefore a real thing. The individual easily takes 
colour from it and the tradition it embodies, tends 
to imitate his fellow-members: and each such deed 
and thought is a step taken in the formation of 
habit, and leaves him other than he was before. 

To say this is not to discredit church-membership 
as placing us at the mercy of emotional suggestion, 
reducing spontaneity to custom, and lessening the 
energy and responsibility of the individual soul to- 
wards God. On the contrary, right group sugges- 
tion reinforces, stimulates, does not stultify such in- 
dividual action. If the prayerful attitude of my 
fellow worshippers helps me to pray better, surely 
It is a very mean kind of conceit on my part which 
would prompt me to despise their help, and refuse 
to acknowledge Creative Spirit acting on me 
through other men? It Is one of the most beauti- 
ful features of a real and living corporate religion, 
that within It ordinary people at all levels help 
each other to be a little more supernatural than 
each would have been alone. I do not now speak 
of individuals possessing special zeal and special 
aptitude; though, as the lives of the Saints assure 
us, even the best of these fluctuate, and need social 

1 Cf. Trotter: "Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War." 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 169 

support at times. Anyhow such persons of special 
spiritual aptitude, as life is now, are as rare as per- 
sons of special aptitude in other walks of life. But 
that which we seek for the life of to-day and of the 
future, is such a planning of it as shall give all men 
the4r spiritual chance. And it is abundantly clear 
upon all levels of life, that men are chiefly formed 
and changed by the power of suggestion, sympathy 
and imitation; and only reach full development 
when assembled in groups, giving full opportunity 
for the benevolent action of these forces. So too 
in the life of the Spirit, Incorporation plays a part 
which nothing can replace. Goodness and devotion 
are more easily caught than taught; by association in 
groups, holy and strong souls — both living and dead 
— make their full gift to society, weak, undeveloped, 
and arrogant souls receive that of which they are in 
need. On this point we may agree with a great 
ecclesiastical scholar of our own day that "the more 
the educated and intellectual partake with sympathy 
of heart in the ordinary devotions and pious prac- 
tices of the poor, the higher will they rise in the 
religion of the Spirit." ^ 

Yet this family life of the ideal religious institu- 
tion, with its reasonable and bracing discipline, Its 
gift of shelter, its care for tradition, its habit-for- 
mation and group consciousness — all this is given, as 
we may as well acknowledge, at the price which Is 
exacted by all family life; namely, mutual accommo- 

1 Dom Cuthbert Butler in the "Hibbert Journal," 1906, p. 502. 



170 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

datlon and sacrifice, place made for the childish, the 
dull, the slow, and the aged, a tonlng-down of the 
somewhat imperious demands of the entirely effi- 
cient and clear-minded, a tolerance of imperfection. 
Thus for these efficient and clear-minded members 
there is always, in the church as in the family, a 
perpetual opportunity of humility, self-effacement, 
gentle acceptance; of exerting that love which must 
be joined to power and a sound mind if the full life 
of the Spirit is to be lived. In the realm of the 
supernatural this Is a solid gain; though not a gain 
which we are very quick to appreciate in our vigor- 
ous youth. Did we look upon the religious institu- 
tion not as an end in Itself, but simply as fulfilling 
the function of a home — giving shelter and nurture, 
opportunity of loyalty and mutual service on one 
hand, conserving stability and good custom on the 
other — then, we should better appreciate Its gifts to 
us, and be more merciful to its necessary defects. 
We should be tolerant to Its inevitable conservatism, 
its tendency to encourage dependence and obe- 
dience and to distrust individual Initiative. We 
should no longer expect it to provide or specially 
to approve novelty and freedom, to be in the van of 
life's forward thrust. For this we must go not to 
the institution, which Is the vehicle of history; but 
to the adventurous, forward moving soul which Is 
the vehicle of progress — to the prophet, not to the 
priest. These two great figures, the Keeper and the 
Revealer, which are prominent in every historical re- 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 171 

ligion, represent the two halves of the fully-lived 
spiritual life. The progress of man depends both 
on conserving and on exploring: and any full incor- 
poration of that life which will serve man's spiritual 
interests now, must find place for both. 

Such an application of the institutional idea to 
present needs is required, in fact, to fulfil at least 
four primary conditions : — 

( 1 ) It must give a social life that shall develop 
group consciousness in respect of our eternal inter- 
ests and responsibilities: using for this real disci- 
pline, and the influences of liturgy and creed. 

(2) Yet it must not so standardize and socialize 
this life as to leave no room for personal freedom 
in the realm of Spirit: for those ''experiences of men 
in their solitude" which form the very heart of 
religion. 

(3) It must not be so ring- fenced, so exclusive, 
so wholly conditioned by the past, that the voice of 
the future, that is of the prophet giving fresh ex- 
pression to eternal truths, cannot clearly be heard 
in it; not only from within its own borders but also 
from outside. But 

(4) On the other hand, it must not be so con- 
temptuous of the past and its priceless symbols that 
it breaks with tradition, and so loses that very ele- 
ment of stability which it is its special province to 
preserve. 

I go on now to the second aspect of institutional 
religion: Cultus. 



172 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

We at once make the transition from Church to 
Cultus, when we ask ourselves: how does, how can, 
the Church as an organized and enduring society 
do its special work of creating an atmosphere and 
imparting a secret? How Is the traditional deposit 
of spiritual experience handed on, the individual 
drawn into the stream of spiritual history and held 
there? Remember, the Church exists to foster and 
hand on, not merely the moral life, the life of this- 
world perfection; but the spiritual life in all its 
mystery and splendour — the life of more than this- 
world perfection, the poetry of goodness, the life 
that aims at God. And this, not only in elect souls, 
which might conceivably make and keep direct con- 
tacts without her help, but in greater or less degree 
in the mass of men, who do need help. How is this 
done? The answer can only be, that it is mostly 
done through symbolic acts, and by means of sug- 
gestion and imitation. 

All organized churches find themselves committed 
sooner or later to an organized cultus. It may be 
rudimentary. It may reach a high pitch of aesthetic 
and symbolic perfection. But even the successive 
rebels against dead ceremony are found as a rule 
to invent some ceremony in their turn. They learn 
by experience the truth that men most easily form 
religious habits and tend to have religious ex- 
periences when they are assembled in groups and 
caused to perform the same acts.' This is so be- 
cause as y/e have already seen, the human psyche Is 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 173 

plastic to the suggestions made to It; and this sugges- 
tibility Is greatly Increased when It Is living a gregari- 
ous life as a member of a united congregation or 
flock, and Is engaged In performing corporate acts. 
The soldiers' drill Is essential to the solidarity of the 
arm.y, and the rehglous service In some form Is — 
apart from all other considerations — essential to the 
solidarity of the Church. 

We need not be afraid to acknowledge that from 
the point of view of the psychologist one prime 
reason of the value and need of religious ceremonies 
abides In this corporate suggestibility of man: or 
that one of their chief works is the production In 
him of mobility of the threshold, and hence of 
spiritual awareness of a generalized kind. As the 
modern mother whispers beneficent suggestions into 
the ear of her sleeping child ^ so the Church takes 
her children at their moment of least resistance, and 
suggests to them all that she desires them to be. 
It is Interesting to note how perfectly adapted the 
rituals of historic Christianity are to this end, of 
provoking the emergence of the Intuitive mind and 
securing a state of maximum suggestibility. The 
more complex and solemn the ritual, the more 
archaic and universal the symbols it employs, so 
much the more powerful — for those natures able to 
yield to it — the suggestion becomes. Music, 
rhythmic chanting, symbolic gesture, the solemn 
periods of recited prayer, are all contributory to 

iBaudouin: "Suggestion and Auto-Suggestion," Cap, VII. 



174 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

this effect. In churches of the Catholic type every 
object that meets the eye, every scent, every attitude 
that we are encouraged to assume, gives us a push 
In the same direction If we let It do Its rightful work. 
For other temperaments the collective, deliberate, 
and really ceremonial silence of the Quakers — the 
hush of the waiting mind, the unforced attitude of 
expectation, the abstraction from visual Image — 
works to the same end. In either case, the aim is the 
production of a special group-consciousness; the 
reinforcing of languid or undeveloped individual 
feeling and aptitude by the suggestion of the crowd. 
This, and Its result, is seen of course In its crudest 
form in revivalism: and on higher levels, In such 
elaborate dramatic ceremonies as those which are a 
feature of the Catholic celebrations of Holy Week. 
But the nice warm devotional feeling with which 
what is called a good congregation finishes the sing- 
ing of a favourite hymn belongs to the same order 
of phenomena. The rhythmic phrases — not as a 
rule very full of meaning or intellectual appeal — 
exercise a slightly hypnotic effect on the analyzing 
surface-mind; and induce a condition of suggesti- 
bility open to all the Influences of the place and of 
our fellow worshippers. The authorized transla- 
tion of Ephesians v. 19: "speaking to yourselves 
in psalms and hymns and spiritual songs," whatever 
we may think of Its accuracy, does as it stands de- 
scribe one of the chief functions of religious services 
of the *'hearty congregational" sort. We do speak 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 175 

to ourselves — our deeper, and more plastic selves 
— in our psalms, and hymns ; so too in the common 
recitation, especially the chanting, of a creed. We 
administer through these rhythmic affirmations, so 
long as we sing them with intention, a powerful 
suggestion to ourselves and every one else within 
reach. We gather up in them — or should do — the 
whole tendency of our worship and aspiration, and 
in the very form in which it can most easily sink in. 
This lays a considerable responsibility on those who 
choose psalms and hymns for congregational sing- 
ing; for these can as easily be the instruments of 
fanatical melancholy and devitalizing, as of chari- 
table life-giving and constructive ideas. 

In saying all this I do not seek to discredit reli- 
gious' ceremony; either of the naive or of the so- 
phisticated type. On the contrary, I think that in 
effecting this change in our mental tone and colour, 
in prompting this emergence of a mood which, m 
the mass of men, is commonly suppressed, these cer- 
emonies do their true work. They should stimulate 
and give social expression to that mood of adora- 
tion which is the very heart of religion; helping 
those who cannot be devotional alone to partici- 
pate in the common devotional feeling. If, then, 
we desire to receive the gifts which corporate wor- 
ship can most certainly make to us, we ought to 
yield ourselves without resistance or criticism to its 
influence; as we yield ourselves to the influence of a 
great work of art. That influence is able to tune 



176 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

us up, at least to a fleeting awareness of spiritual 
reality; and each such emergence of transcendental 
feeling Is to the good. It Is true that the objects 
which Immediately evoke this feeling will only be 
symbolic; but after all, our very best conceptions 
of God are bound to be that. We do not, or 
should not, demand scientific truth of them. Their 
business Is rather to give us poetry, a concrete artis- 
tic intuition of reality, and to place us in the mood of 
poetry. The great thing Is, that by these corporate 
liturgic practices and surrenders, we can prevent that 
terrible freezing up of the deep wells of our being 
which so easily comes to those who must lead an 
exacting material or Intellectual life. We keep our- 
selves supple; the spiritual faculties are within 
reach, and susceptible to education. 

Organized ceremonial religion insists upon it, that 
at least for a certain time each day or week we 
shall attend to the things of the Spirit. It offers us 
its suggestions, and shuts off as well as it can con- 
flicting suggestions: though, human as we are, the 
mere appearance of our neighbours Is often enough 
to bring these In. Nothing Is more certain than 
this: first that we shall never know the spiritual 
world unless we give ourselves the chance of at- 
tending to it, clear a space for It in our busy lives; 
and next, that It will not produce Its real effect In 
us, unless It penetrates below the conscious surface 
Into the deeps of the instinctive mind, and moulds 
this in accordance with the regnant idea. If we 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 177 

are to receive the gifts of the cultus, we on our part 
must bring to It at the very least what we bring to 
all great works of art that speak to us: that Is to 
say, attention, surrender, sympathetic emotion. 
Otherwise, hke all other works of art, it will re- 
main external to us. Much of the perfectly sincere 
{denunciation and dislike of religious ceremony which 
now finds frequent utterance comes from those 
who have failed thus to do their share. They 
are like the hasty critics who dismiss some great 
work of art because It is not representative, 
or historically accurate; and so entirely miss 
the aesthetic values which it was created to Im- 
part. 

Consider a picture of the Madonna. Minds at 
different levels may find In this pure representation, 
Bible history, theology, sesthetic satisfaction, spirit- 
ual truth. The peasant may see in it the portrait 
of the Mother of God, the critic a phase In artistic 
evolution; whilst the mystic may pass through It to 
new contacts with the Spirit of life. We shall re- 
ceive according to the measure of what we bring. 
Now consider the parallel case of some great dra- 
matic liturgy, rich with the meanings which history 
has poured into it. Take, as an example which 
every one can examine for themselves, the Roman 
Mass. Different levels of mind will find here magic, 
theology, deep mystery, the commemoration under 
archaic symbols of an event. But above and beyond 
all these, they can find the solemn incorporated 



178 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

emotion of the Christian Church, and a llturgic re- 
capitulation of the movement of the human soul 
towards fullness of life: through confession and rec- 
onciliation to adoration and intercession — that Is, 
to charity — and thence to direct communion with 
and feeding on the Divine World. 

To the mind which refuses to yield to it, to move 
with its movement, but remains in critical isola- 
tion, the Mass like all other ceremonies will seem 
external, dead, unreal; lacking in religious content. 
But if we do give ourselves completely and un- 
selfconsciously to the movement of such a ceremony, 
at the end of it we may not have learnt anything, 
but we have lived something. And when we re- 
member that no experience of our devotional life is 
lost, surely we may regard It as worth while to sub- 
mit ourselves to an experience by which, if only 
for a few minutes, we are thus lifted to richer 
levels of life and brought into touch with higher 
values? We have Indeed only to observe the en- 
richment of life so often produced in those who 
thus dwell meekly and without inner conflict in the 
symbolic world of ceremonial religion, and accept 
its discipline and its gifts, to be led at least to a 
humble suspension of judgment as to its value. A 
whole world of spiritual experience separates the 
humble little church mouse rising at six every morn- 
ing to attend a service which she believes to be 
pleasing to a personal God, from the philosopher 
who meditates on the Absolute in a comfortable 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 179 

armchair; and no one will feel much doubt as to 
which side the advantage lies. 

Here we approach the next point. The cultus, 
with its liturgy and its discipline, exists for and 
promotes the repetition of acts which are primarily 
the expression of man's instinct for God; and by 
these — or any other repeated acts — our ductile in- 
stinctive life is given a definite trend. We know 
from Semon's researches ^ that the performance of 
any given act by a living creature influences all 
future performances of similar acts. That is to 
say, memory combines with each fresh stimulus to 
control our reaction to it. "In the case of living 
organisms," says Bertrand Russell, "practically 
everything that is distinctive both of their physi- 
cal and mental behaviour is bound up with this per- 
sistent influence of the past'' : and most actions and 
responses "can only be brought under causal laws 
by including past occurrences in the history of the 
organism as part of the causes of the present re- 
sponse." ^ The phenomena of apperception, in 
fact, form only one aspect of a general law. As 
that which we have perceived conditions what we 
can now perceive, so that which we have done con- 
ditions what we shall do. It therefore appears 
that in spite of angry youthful revolts or mature 
sophistications, early religious training, and espe- 
cially repeated religious acts, are likely to influence 

iCf. R. Semon: "Die Mneme." 

2 Bertrand Russell : "The Analysis of Mind," p. 78. 



180 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

the whole of our future lives. Though all they 
meant to us seems dead or unreal, they have re- 
treated to the dark background of consciousness and 
there live on. The tendency which they have given 
persists; we never get away from them. A church 
may often seem to lose her children, as human 
parents do; but in spite of themselves they retain 
her invisible seal, and are her children still. In 
nearly all conversions in middle life, or dramatic 
returns from scepticism to traditional belief, a large, 
part is undoubtedly played by forgotten childish 
memories and early religious discipline, surging up 
and contributing their part to the self's new ap- 
prehensions of Reality. 

If, then, the cultus did nothing else, it would 
do these two highly important things. It would 
influence our whole present attitude by its sugges- 
tions, and our whole future attitude through un- 
conscious memory of the acts which it demands. 
But it does more than this. It has as perhaps its 
greatest function the providing of a concrete artis- 
tic expression for bur spiritual perceptions, adora- 
tions and desires. It links the visible with the in- 
visible, by translating transcendent fact into sym- 
bolic and even sensuous terms. And for this reason 
men, having bodies no less surely than spirits, can 
never afford wholly to dispense with it. Hasty 
transcendentalists often forget this; and set us spir- 
itual standards to which the race, so long as it is 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 181 

anchored to this planet and to the physical order, 
cannot conform. 

A convert from agnosticism with whom I was 
acquainted, was once receiving religious Instruction 
from a devout and simple-minded nun. They were 
discussing the story of the Annunciation, which pre- 
sented some difficulties to her. At last she said to 
the nun, "Well, anyhow, I suppose that one is not 
obliged to believe that the Blessed Virgin was vis- 
ited by a solid angel, dressed In a white robe?" To 
this the nun replied doubtfully, "No, dear, per- 
haps not. But still, you know, he would have to 
wear something/* 

Now here, as it seems to me, we have a great 
theological truth in a few words. The elusive con- 
tacts and subtle realities of the world of spirit have 
got to wear something, if we are to grasp them at 
all. Moreover, if the mass of men are to grasp 
them ever so little, they must wear something which 
is easily recognized by the human eye and human 
heart; more, by the primitive, half-conscious folk- 
soul existing in each one of us, stirring in the depths 
and reaching out in its own way towards God. It 
is a delicate matter to discuss religious symbols. 
They are like our intimate friends: though at the 
bottom of our hearts we may know that they are 
only human, we hate other people to tell us so. 
And, even as the love of human beings in its most 
perfect state passes beyond its immediate object, is 



182 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

transfigured, and merged in the nature of all love; 
so too, the devotion which a purely symbolic figure 
calls forth from the ardently religious nature — 
whether this figure be the divine Krishna of Hin- 
duism, the Buddhist's Mother of Mercy, the Sufi's 
Beloved, or those objects of traditional Christian 
piety which are familiar to all of us — this devo- 
tion too passes beyond its immediate goal and the 
relative truth there embodied, and is eternalized. 
It is characteristic of the primitive mind that it 
finds a difliculty about universals, and is most at 
home with particulars. The success of Christianity 
as a world-religion largely abides in the way in 
which it meets this need. It is notorious that the 
person of Jesus, rather than the Absolute God, is 
the object of average Protestant devotion. So too 
the Catholic peasant may find it easier to approach 
God through and in his special saint, or even a 
special local form of the Madonna. This is the in- 
evitable corollary of the psychic level at which he 
lives; and to speak contemptuously of his "supersti- 
tion" is wholly beside the point. Other great 
faiths have been compelled by experience to meet 
this same need of a particular object on which the 
primitive religious consciousness can fasten itself: 
conspicuous examples being the development within 
Buddhism of the cult of the Great Mother, and 
within pure Brahminism of Krishna worship. 
Wherever it may be destined to end, here it is that 
the life of the Spirit begins; emerging very gently 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 183 

from our simplest human Impulses and needs. Yet, 
since the Universalj the Idea, Is manifested in each 
such particular, we need not refuse to allow that 
the mass of men do thus enjoy — In a way that their 
psychic level makes natural to them — their own 
measure of communion with the Creative Spirit of 
God; and already live according to their measure a 
spiritual life. 

These objects of religious cultus, then, and the 
whole symbolic faith-world which is built up of 
them, with its angels and demons, its sharply de- 
fined heaven and hell, the Divine personifications 
which embody certain attributes of God for us, the 
purity and gentleness of the Mother, the simplicity 
and infinite possibility of the Child, the divine self- 
giving of the Cross; — more, the Lamb, the Blood 
and the Fire of the revivalists, the oil and water, 
bread and wine, of a finished Sacramentalism — all 
these may be regarded as the vestures placed by 
man, at one stage or another of his progress, on 
the freely-given but ineffable spiritual fact. Like 
other clothes, they have now become closely Identi- 
fied with that which wears them. And we strip 
them off at our own peril : for this proceeding, grate- 
ful as it may be to our intellects, may leave us face 
to face with a mystery which we dare not look at, 
and cannot grasp. 

So, cultus has done a mighty thing for humanity, 
in evolving and conserving the system of symbols 
througn which the Infinite and Eternal can be in 



184 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

some measure expressed. The history of these 
symbols goes back, as we now know, to the infancy 
of the race, and forward to the last productions of 
the religious imagination; all of which bear the 
image of our past. They are like coins, varying 
in beauty, and often of slight intrinsic value; but 
of enormous importance for our spiritual currency, 
because accepted as the representatives of a real 
wealth. In its symbols, the cultus preserves all the 
past levels of religious response achieved by the 
race; weaving them into the fabric of religion, and 
carrying them forward into the present. All the 
instinctive movements of the primitive mind; its 
fear of the invisible, its self-subjection, its trust in 
ritual acts, amulets, spells, sacrifices, its tendency 
to localize Deity in certain places or shrines, to buy 
off the unknown, to setup magicians and mediators, 
are represented in it. Its function is racial more 
than individual. It is the art-work of the folk- 
soul in the religious sphere. Here man's inveterate 
creative faculty seizes on the raw material given 
him by religious intuition, and constructs from it 
significant shapes. We misunderstand, then, tTie 
whole character of religious symbolism if we either 
demand rationality from it, or try to adapt its im- 
agery to the lucid and probably mistaken conclusions 
of the sophisticated modern mind. 

We are learning to recognize these primitive and 
racial elements In popular religion, and to endure 
their presence with tolerance; because they are nee- 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 185 

essary, and match a level of mental life which 
Is still active in the race. This more primitive life 
emerges to dominate all crowds — where the col- 
lective mental level is inevitably lower than that of 
the best individuals immersed in it — and still con- 
ditions many of our beliefs and deeds. There is 
the propitiatory attitude to unseen Divine powers; 
which the primitive mind, in defiance of theology, 
insists on regarding as somehow hostile to us and 
wanting to be bought off. There is the whole idea 
and apparatus of sacrifice; even though no more 
than the big apples and vegetable marrows of the 
harvest festival be involved in it. There is the 
continued belief in a Deity who can and should be 
persuaded to change the weather, or who punishes 
those who offend Him by famine, earthquake and 
pestilence. Vestigial relics of all these phases can 
still be discovered in the Book of Common Prayer. 
There is further the undying vogue of the religious 
amulet. There is the purely magical efEcacy which 
some churches attribute to their sacraments, rites, 
shrines, llturgic formulae and religious objects; 
others, to the texts of their scriptures.^ These 
things, and others like them, are not only significant 
survivals from the past. They also represent the 
religious side of something that continues active In 
us at present. Since, then. It should clearly be the 

^ A quaint example of this occurred in a recent revival, where 
the exclamation "We believe in the Word of God from cover to 
cover, Alleluia!" received the fervent reply, "And the covers 
too!" 



186 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

object of all spiritual endeavour to win the whole 
man and not only his reason for God, speaking to 
his instincts In language that they understand, we 
should not too hurriedly despise or denounce these 
things. Far better that our primitive emotion^, 
with their vast store of potential energy, should 
be won for spiritual interests on the only terms 
which they can grasp, than that they should be left 
to spend themselves on lower objects. 

If therefore the spiritual or the regenerate life 
Is not likely to prosper without some incorporation 
In Institutions, some definite link with the past, 
it seems also likely to need for its full working-out 
and propaganda the symbols and liturgy of a cultus. 
Here again, the right path will be that of fulfilment, 
not of destruction; a deeper Investigation of the 
full meaning of cultus, the values it conserves and 
the needs It must meet, a clearer and humbler un- 
derstanding of our human limitations. We must 
also clearly realize as makers of the future, that 
as the Church has Its special dangers of conserva- 
tism, cosiness. Intolerance, a checking of initiative, 
the domestic tendency to enclose itself and shirk 
reality; so the cultus has also its special dangers, 
of which the chief are perhaps formalism, magic, 
and spiritual sloth. Receiving and conserving as It 
does all the successive deposits of racial experience, 
It Is the very home of magic: of the archaic ten- 
dency to attribute absolute value to prescribed 
words and deeds, special power to a priestly caste, 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 187 

and to make of itself the essential mediator between 
Creative Spirit and the soul. Further, using per- 
petually as it does and must symbols of the most 
archaic sort, directly appealing to the latent prim- 
itive in each of us, it offers us a perpetual temptation 
to fall back into something below our best possible. 
The impulsive mind is inevitably conservative; al- 
ways at the mercy of memorized images. Hence 
its delighted self-yielding to traditional symbols, its 
uncritical emotionalism, its easy slip-back into tra- 
ditional and even archaic and self-contradictory be- 
liefs: the way in which it pops out and enjoys it- 
self at a service of the hearty congregational sort, 
or may even lead its unresisting owner to the re- 
vivalists' penitent-bench. 

But on the other hand, Creative Spirit is not 
merely conservative. The Lord and Giver of Life 
presses forward, and perpetually brings novelty to 
birth; and in so far as we are dedicated to Him, we 
must not make an unconditional surrender to psychic 
indolence, or to the pull-back of the religious past. 
We may not, as Christians, accept easy emotions in 
the place of heroic and difficult actualizations : make 
external religion an excuse for dodging reality, im- 
merse ourselves In an exquisite dream, or tolerate 
any real conflict between old cultus and actual living 
faith. A most delicate discrimination Is therefore 
demanded from us; the striking of a balance be- 
tween the rightful conservatism of the cultus and 
the rightful independence of the soul. Yet, this is 



188 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

not to justify even In the most advanced a whole- 
sale iconoclasm. Time after time, experience has 
proved that the attempt to approach God "with- 
out means," though It may seem to describe the rare 
and sacred moments of the personal life of the 
Spirit, is beyond the power of the mass of men; and 
even those who do achieve It are, as It were, most 
often supported from behind by religious history 
and the religious culture of their day. I do not 
think it can be doubted that the right use of cultus 
does increase religious sensitiveness. Therefore 
here the difficult task of the future must be to pre- 
serve and carry forward its essential elements, all 
the symbolic significance, all the Incorporated emo- 
tion, which make it one of man's greatest works 
of art; whilst eliminating those features which are, 
In the bad sense, conventional and no longer answer 
to experience or communicate life. 

Were we truly reasonable human beings, we 
should perhaps provide openly and as a matter of 
course within the Christian frame widely different 
types of ceremonial religion, suited to different 
levels of mind and different developments of the 
religious consciousness. To some extent this is al- 
ready done: traditionalism and liberalism, sacra- 
mentalism, revivalism, quietism, have each their; 
existing cults. But these varying types of church 
now appear as competitors, too often hostile; and 
not as the complementary and graded expressions 
of one life, each having truth in the relative though 



INSTITUTIONAL RELIGION 189 

none In the absolute sense. Did we more openly 
acknowledge the character of that life, the historic 
Churches would no longer invite the sophisticated 
to play down to their own primitive fantasies; to 
sing meaningless hymns and recite vindictive psalms, 
or lull themselves by the recitation of litany or 
rosary which, admirable as the instruments of sug- 
gestion, are inadequate expressions of the awakened 
spiritual life. On the one hand, they would not re- 
quire the simple to express their corporate religious 
feeling In Elizabethan English or Patristic Latin; 
on the other, expect the educated to accept at face- 
value symbols of which the unreal character is 
patent to them. Nor would they represent these 
activities as possessing absolute value in themselves. 
To join in simplicity and without criticism in the 
common worship, humbly receiving Its good In- 
fluences, Is one thing. This Is like the drill of the 
loyal soldier; welding him to his neighbours, giving 
him the corporate spirit and forming In him the 
habits he needs. But to stop short at that drill, 
and tell the individual that drill is the essence of 
his life and all his duty. Is another thing altogether. 
It confuses means and end; destroys the balance 
between liberty and law. If the religious Institu- 
tion is to do its real work in furthering the life of 
the Spirit, it must introduce a more rich variety into 
Its methods; and thus educate souls of every type 
not only to be members of the group but also to 
grow up to the full richness of the personal life. 



190 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

It must offer them — as indeed Catholicism does to 
some extent already — both easy emotion and diffi- 
cult mystery; both dramatic ceremony and ceremo- 
nial silence. It must also give to them all its hoarded 
knowledge of the inner life of prayer and contem- 
plation, of the remaking of the moral nature on 
supernatural levels: all the gold that there is in the 
deposit of faith. And it must not be afraid to im- 
part that knowledge in modern terms which all can 
understand. All this it can and will do if its mem- 
bers sufficiently desire it: which means, if those who 
care intensely for the life of the Spirit accept their 
corporate responsibilities. In the last resort, criti- 
cism of the Church, of Christian institutionalism, is 
really criticism of ourselves. Were we more spir- 
itually alive, our spiritual homes would be the real 
nesting places of new life. That which the Church 
is to us is the result of all that we bring to, and ask 
from, history: the impact of our present and its 
past. 



CHAPTER VI 

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 

In the last three chapters we have been concerned, 
almost exclusively, with those facts of psychic life 
and growth, those instruments and mechanizations, 
which bear upon or condition our spiritual life. 
But these wanderings in the souFs workshops, and 
these analyses of the forces that play on it, give 
us far too cold or too technical a view of that richly 
various and dynamic thing, the real regenerated 
life. I wish now to come out of the workshop, 
and try to see this spiritual life as the individual 
man may and should achieve it, from another angle 
of approach. 

What are we to regard as the heart of spiritual- 
ity? When we have eliminated the accidental char- 
acters with which varying traditiohs have endowed 
it, what is it that still so definitely distinguishes its 
possessor from the best, most moral citizen or de- 
voted altruist? Why do the Christian saint, Indian 
rishi, Buddhist arhat, Moslem sufi, all seem to us 
at bottom men of one race, living under different 
sanctions one life, witnessing to one fact? This 
life, which they show in its various perfections, in- 
cludes it is true the ethical life, but cannot be 

191 



192 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

equated with it. Wherein do its differentia con- 
sist? We are dealing with the most subtle of reali- 
ties and have only the help or crude words, de- 
veloped for other purposes than this. But surely 
we come near to the truth, as history and expe- 
rience show it to us, when we say again that the 
spiritual life in all its manifestations from smallest 
beginnings to unearthly triumph is simply the life 
that means God in all His richness, immanent and 
transcendent: the whole response to the Eternal 
and Abiding of which any one man is capable, ex- 
pressed in and through his this-world life. It re- 
quires then an objective vision or certitude, some- 
thing to aim at; and also a total integration of the 
self, its dedication to that aim. Both terms, vision 
and response, are essential to it. 

This definition may seem at first sight rather dull. 
It suggests little of that poignant and unearthly 
beauty, that heroism, that immense attraction, which 
really belong to the spiritual life. Here Indeed we 
are dealing with poetry In action: and we need not 
words but music to describe It as It really Is. Yet 
all the forms, all the various beauties and achieve- 
ments of this life of the Spirit, can be resumed as 
the reactions of different temperaments to the one 
abiding and inexhaustibly satisfying Object of their 
love. It is the answer made by the whole supple, 
plastic self, rational and instinctive, active and con- 
templative, to any or all of those objective experi- 
ences of religion which we considered In the first 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 193 

chapter ; whether of an encompassing and transcend- 
ent Reality, of a Divine Companionship or of Imma- 
nent Spirit. Such a response we must believe to be 
itself divinely actuated. Fully made, it Is found on 
the one hand to call forth the most heroic, most 
beautiful, most tender qualities In human nature; all 
that we call holiness, the transfiguration of mere 
ethics by a supernatural lovehness, breathing an- 
other air, satisfying another standard, than those 
of the temporal world. And on the other hand, 
this response of the self Is repaid by a new sensitive- 
ness and receptivity, a new Influx of power. To 
use theological language, will is answered by grace : 
and as the will's dedication rises towards complete- 
ness the more fully does new life flow in. There- 
fore it is plain that the smallest and humblest be- 
ginning of such a life in ourselves — and this in- 
quiry is aiseless unless it be made to speak to our 
own condition — will entail not merely an addition 
to life, but for us too a change in our whole scale of 
values, a self-dedication. For that which we are 
here shown as a possible human achievement is not 
a life of comfortable piety, or the enjoyment of the 
delicious sensations of the armchair mystic. We 
are offered, it is true, a new dower of life ; access to 
the full possibilities of human nature. But only 
upon terms, and these terms Include new obligations 
in respect of that life; compelling us, as it appears, 
to perpetual hard and difficult choices, a perpetual 
refusal to sink back into the next-best, to slide 



194 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

along a gentle Incline. The spiritual life is not 
lived upon the heavenly hearth-rug, within safe dis- 
tance from the Fire of Love. It demands, Indeed, 
very often things so hard that seen from the hearth- 
rug they seem to us superhuman: Immensely gen- 
erous compassion, forbearance, forgiveness, gentle- 
ness, radiant purity, self-forgetting zeal. It means 
a complete conquest of life's perennial tendency to 
lag behind the best possible; willing acceptance of 
hardship and pain. And If we ask how this can 
be, what It Is that makes possible such enhance- 
ment of human will and of human courage, the 
only answer seems to be that of the Johannlne 
Christ: that It does consist in a more abundant life. 
In the second chapter of this 'book, we looked at 
the gradual unfolding of that life in Its great his- 
torical representatives; and we found Its general 
line of development to lead through disillusion with 
the merely physical to conversion to the spiritual, 
and thence by way of hard moral conflicts and their 
resolution to a unification of character, a full In- 
tegration of the active and contemplative sides of 
life; resulting In fresh power, and a complete dedi- 
cation to work within the new order and for the new 
Ideals. There was something of the penitent, some- 
thing of the contemplative, and something of the 
apostle In every man or woman who thus grew to 
their full stature and realized all their latent possi- 
bilities. But above all there was a fortitude, an 
all-round power of tackling existence, which comes 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 195 

from complete Indifference to personal suffering or 
personal success?. And further, psychology showed 
us, that those workings and readjustments which 
we saw preparing this life of the Spirit, were In 
line with those which prepare us for fullness of 
life on other levels: that Is to say the harnessing 
of the Impulsive nature to the purposes chosen by 
consciousness, the resolving of conflicts, the unifica- 
tion of the whole personality about one's dominant 
interest. These readjustments were helped by the 
deliberate acceptance of the useful suggestions of 
religion, the education of the foreconsclous, the 
formation of habits of charity and prayer. 

The greatest and most real of living writers on 
this subject, Baron von Hiigel, has given us another 
definition of the personal spiritual life which may 
fruitfully be compared with this. It must and shall, 
he says, exhibit rightful contact with and renuncia- 
tion of the Particular and Fleeting; and with this 
ever seeks and finds the Eternal — deepening and In- 
carnating within its own experience this "transcen- 
dent Otherness." ^ Nt)thing which we are likely to 
achieve can go beyond this profound saying. We 
see how many rich elements are contained in it : effort 
and growth, a temper both social and ascetic, a de- 
mand for and a receiving of power. True, to some 
extent it restates the position at which we arrived 
in the first chapter: but we now wish to examine 

1 This doctrine is fully worked out in the last two sections of 
"Eternal Life." 



196 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

more thoroughly Into that position and discover its 
practical applications. Let us then begin by un- 
packing it, and examining its chief characters one 
by one. 

If we do this, we find that it demands of us: — 

( 1 ) Rightful contact with the Particular and 
Fleeting. That is, a willing acceptance of all this- 
world tasks, obligations, relations, and joys; in fact, 
the Active Life of Becoming in its completeness. 

(2) But also, a certain renunciation of that Par- 
ticular and Fleeting. A refusal to get everything 
out of it that we can for ourselves, to be possessive, 
or attribute to it absolute worth. This involves a 
sense of detachment or asceticism; of further des- 
tiny and obligation for the soul than complete 
earthly happiness or here-and-now success. 

(3) And with this ever — not merely in hours of 
devotion — to seek and find the Eternal; penetrat- 
ing our wholesome this-world action through and 
through with the very spirit of contemplation. 

(4) Thus deepening and incarnating — bringing 
in, giving body to, and In some sense exhibiting by 
means of our own growing and changing experience 
— that transcendent Otherness, the fact of the Life 
of the Spirit in the here-and-now. 

The full life of the Spirit, then. Is once more 
declared to be active, contemplative, ascetic and 
apostolic; though nowadays we express these abid- 
ing human dispositions in other and less formidable 
terms. If we translate them as work, prayer, self- 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 197 

discipline and social service they do not look quite so 
bad. But even so, what a tremendous programme 
to put before the ordinary human creature, and 
how difficult it looks when thus arranged! That 
balance to be discovered and held between due con- 
tact with this present living world of time, and due 
renunciation of it. That continual penetration of 
the time-world with the spirit of Eternity. 

But now, in accordance with the ruling idea which 
has occupied us in this book, let us arrange these 
four demands in different order. Let us put number 
three first: *'ever seeking and finding the Eternal. '^ 
Conceive, at least, that we do this really, and in a 
practical way. Then we discover that, placed as we 
certainly are in a world of succession, most of the 
seeking and finding has got to be done there; that 
the times of pure abstraction in which we touch the 
non-successive and supersensual must be few. 
Hence it follows that the first and second demands 
are at once fully met; for, if we are indeed faith- 
fully seeking and finding the Eternal whilst living 
— as all sane men and women must do — in closest 
contact with the Particular and Fleeting, our accept- 
ances and our renunciations will be governed by this 
higher term of experience. And further, the tran- 
scendent Otherness, perpetually envisaged by us as 
alone giving the world of sense its beauty, reality 
and value, will be incarnated and expressed by us In 
this sense-life, and thus ever more completely tasted 
and known. It will be drawn by us, as best we can, 



198 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

and often at the cost of bitter struggle, Into the 
limitations of humanity; entlncturing our attitude 
and our actions. And In the degree in which we 
thus appropriate It, it will be given out by us again 
to other men. 

All this, of course, says again that which men have 
been constantly told by those who sought to redeem 
them from their confusions, and show them the way 
to fullness of life. "Seek first the Kingdom of 
God," said Jesus, "and all the rest shall be added to 
you." "Love," said St. Augustine, "and do what 
you like"; "Let nothing," says Thomas a Kempis, 
"be great or high or acceptable to thee but purely 
God"; ^ and Kabir, "Open your eyes of love, and 
see Him who pervades this world! consider it well, 
and know that this Is your own country." ^ "Our 
whole teaching," says Boehme, "is nothing else than 
how man should kindle in himself God's light- 
world." ^ I do not say that such a presentation of 
it makes the personal spiritual life any easier: 
nothing does that. But It does make its central 
implicit rather clearer, shows us at once Its difficulty 
and its simplicity; since it depends on the consistent 
subordination of every impulse and every action to 
one regnant aim and Interest — in other words, the 
unification of the whole self round one centre, the 
highest conceivable by man. Each of man's be- 
haviour-cycles is always directed towards some end, 

1 De Imit. Christi, Bk. II, Cap. 6. 

2 "Six Theosophic Points," p. 75. 

8 "One Hundred Poems of Kabir," p. 78. 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 199 

of which he may or may not be vividly conscious. 
But in that perfect unification of the self which 
is characteristic of the life of Spirit, all his be- 
haviour is brought into one stream of purpose, and 
directed towards one transcendent end. And this 
simplification alone means for him a release from 
conflicting wishes, and so a tremendous increase of 
power. 

If then we admit this formula, *'ever seeking and 
finding the Eternal" — which is of course another 
rendering of Ruysbroeck's "aiming at God" — as 
the prime character of a spiritual life, the secret 
of human transcendence; what are the agents by 
which it is done? 

Here, men and women of all times and all re- 
ligions, who have achieved this fullness of life, 
agree in their answer: and by this answer we are at 
once taken away from dry philosophic conceptions 
and introduced into the very heart of human ex- 
perience. It is done, they say, on man's part by 
Love and Prayer: and these, properly understood 
in their inexhaustible richness, joy, pain, dedica- 
tion and noble simplicity, cover the whole field of 
the spiritual life. Without them, that life is im- 
possible; with them, if the self be true to their im- 
plications, some measure of it cannot be escaped. 
I said, Love and Prayer properly understood: not as 
two movements of emotional piety, but as funda- 
mental human dispositions, as the typical attitude 
and action which control man's growth into greater 



200 THE life: OF THE SPIRIT 

reality. Since then they are of such primary im- 
portance to us, it will be worth while at this stage 
to look into them a little more closely. 

First, Love : that over-worked and ill-used word, 
often confused on the one hand with passion and 
on the other with amiability. If we ask the most 
fashionable sort of psychologist what love is, he 
says that it is the impulse urging us towards that 
end which is the fulfilment of any series of deeds or 
"behaviour-cycle"; the psychic thread, on which all 
the apparently separate actions making up that cycle 
are strung and united. In this sense love need not 
be fully conscious, reach the level of feeling; but it 
viust be an imperativ^e, inward urge. And if we 
ask those who have known and taught the life of 
the Spirit, they too say that love is a passionate ten- 
dency, an inward vital urge of the soul towards its 
Source; ^ which impels every living thing to pursue 
the most profound trend of its being, reaches con- 
sciousness in the form of self-giving and of desire, 
and its only satisfying goal in God. Love Is for 
them much more than Its emotional manifestations. 
It Is '*the ultimate cause of the true activities of all 
active things" — no less. This definition, which I 
take as a matter of fact from St. Thomas Aquinas,^ 
would be agreeable to the most modern psycholo- 
gist; though he might give the hidden steersman of 
the psyche in its perpetual movement towards nov- 

iCf. Ruysbroeck: "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap. 
VIII. 
2 "In Librura B. Dionysii de Divinis Nominibus coramentaria." 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 201 

elty a less beautiful and significant name. "This 
indwelling Love," says Plotlnus, "Is no other than 
the Spirit which, as we are told, walks with every 
being, the affection dominant In each several nature. 
It Implants the characteristic desire; the particular 
soul, strained towards Its own natural objects, brings 
forth Its own Love, the guiding spirit realizing its 
worth and the quality of Its being." ^ 

Does not all this suggest to us once more, that at 
whatever level It be experienced, the psychic craving, 
the urgent spirit within us pressing out to life. Is 
always one; and that the sublimation of this vital 
craving, its direction to God, is the essence of regen- 
eration? There, in our Instinctive nature — ^whlch, 
as we know, makes us the kind of animal we are — 
abides that power of loving which is, really, the 
power of living; the cause of our actions, the con- 
trolling factor in our perceptions, the force pressing 
us into any given type of experience, turning aside 
for no obstacles but stimulated by them to a greater 
vigour. Each level of the universe makes solicita- 
tions to this power: the worlds of sense, of thought, 
of beauty, and of action. According to the degree 
of our development, the trend of the conscious will, 
Is our response; and according to that response will 
be our life. "The world to which a man turns him- 
self," says Boehme, "and In which he produces fruit, 
the same Is lord In him, and this world becomes man- 
ifest In him." ^ 

1 Ennead III. 5, 4. 

2 Boehme: "Six Theosophic Points," p. 75. 



202 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

From all this It becomes clear what the love of 
God is; and what St. Augustine meant when he said 
that all virtue — and virtue after all means power not 
goodness — lay in the right ordering of love, the 
conscious orientation of desire. Christians, on the 
authority of their Master, declare that such love 
of God requires all that they have, not only of feel- 
ing, but also of intellect and of power; since He Is 
to be loved with heart and mind and strength. 
Thought and action on highest levels are Involved 
In it, for It means, not religious emotionalism, but 
the unfllckering orientation of the whole self towards 
Him, ever seeking and finding the Eternal; the link- 
ing up of all behaviour on that string, so that the 
apparently hard and always heroic choices which 
are demanded, are made at last because they are 
Inevitable. It is true that this dominant interest 
will give to our lives a special emotional colour and 
a special kind of happiness; but In this, as In the best, 
deepest, richest human love, such feeling-tone and 
such happiness — though In some natures of great 
beauty and Intensity — are only to be looked upon 
as secondary characters, and never to be aimed at. 

When St. Teresa said that the real object of the 
spiritual marriage was "the incessant production 
of work, work," ^ I have no doubt that many of her 
nuns were disconcerted; especially the type of ease- 
loving conservatives whom she and her Intimates 
were accustomed to refer to as the pussy-cats. But 

i*'The Interior Castle": Seventh Habitation, Cap. IV. 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 203 

in this direct application to religious experience of 
St. Thomas^ doctrine of love, she set up an ideal of 
the spiritual life which is as valid at the present day 
in the entanglements of our social order, as it was In 
the enclosed convents of sixteenth-century Spain. 
Love, we said, is the cause of action. It urges and 
directs our behaviour, conscious and involuntary, 
towards an end. The mother is irresistibly im- 
pelled to act towards her child's welfare, the am- 
bitious man towards success, the artist towards ex- 
pression of his vision. All these are examples of 
behaviour, love-driven towards ends. And re- 
ligious experience discloses to us a greater more in- 
clusive end, and this vital power of love as capable 
of being used on the highest levels, regenerated, 
directed to eternal Interests; subordinating be- 
haviour, inspiring suffering, unifying the whole self 
and Its activities, mobilizing them for this transcen- 
dental achievement. This generous love, to go 
back to the quotation from Baron von Hiigel which 
opened our inquiry, will indeed cause the behaviour 
it controls to exhibit both rightful contact with and 
renunciation of the particular and fleeting; because 
in and through this series of linked deeds it is unit- 
ing with itself all human activities, and in and 
through them Is seeking and finding Its eternal end. 
So, in that rightful bringlng-In of novelty which is 
the business of the fully living soul, the most power- 
ful agent is love, understood as the controlling fac- 
tor of behaviour, the sublimation and union of will 



204 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

and desire. "Let love," says Boehme, ''be the life 
of thy nature. It killeth thee not, but quickeneth 
thee according to its life, and then thou livest, yet 
not to thy own will but to its will: for thy will be- 
cometh its will, and then thou art dead to thyself 
but alive to God." ^ There is the true, solid and 
for us most fruitful doctrine of divine union, uncon- 
nected with any rapture, trance, ecstasy or abnormal 
state of mind: a union organic, conscious, and dy- 
namic with the Creative Spirit of Life. 

If we now go on to ask how, specially, we shall 
achieve this union In such degree as is possible to 
each one of us; the answer must be, that It will be 
done by Prayer. If the seeking of the Eternal is 
actuated by love, the finding of it is achieved 
through prayer. Prayer, in fact — understood as 
a life or state, not an act or an asking — is the be- 
ginning, middle and end of all that we are now 
considering. As the social self can only be de- 
veloped by contact with society, so the spiritual self 
can only be developed by contact with the spiritual 
world. And such humble yet ardent contact with 
the spiritual world — opening up to Its suggestions 
our impulses, our reveries, our feelings, our most 
secret dispositions as well as our mere thoughts — 
is the essence of prayer, understood in Its widest 
sense. No more than surrender or love can such 
prayer be reduced to ''one act." Those who seek 
to sublimate it into "pure" contemplation are as lim- 

1 Boehme: "The Way to Christ," Pt. IV. 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 205 

Ited at one end of the scale, as those who reduce It 
to articulate petition are at the other. It contains 
in Itself a rich variety of human reactions and ex- 
periences. It opens the door upon an unwalled 
world, in which the self truly lives and therefore 
makes widely various responses to Its infinitely vary- 
ing stimuli. Into that world the self takes, or 
should take, its special needs, aptitudes and long- 
ings, and matches them against its apprehension of 
Eternal Truth. In this meeting of the human heart 
with all that it can apprehend of Reality, not adora- 
tion alone but unbounded contrition, not humble de- 
pendence alone but joy, peace and power, not rap- 
ture alone but mysterious darkness, must be woven 
Into the fabric of love. In this world the soul may 
sometimes wander as if in pastures, sometimes is 
poised breathless and intent. Sometimes it Is fed 
by beauty, sometimes by most difficult truth, and ex- 
periences the extremes of riches and destitution, 
darkness and light. "It is not," says Plotinus, *'by 
crushing the Divine into a unity but by displaying 
its exuberance, as the Supreme Himself has dis- 
played it, that we show knowledge of the might of 
God." 1 

Thus, by that instinctive and warmly devoted di- 
rection of its behaviour which is love, and that 
willed attention to and communion with the spirit- 
ual world which is prayer, all the powers of the self 
are united and turned towards the seeking and find- 

lEnnead II. 9. 9. 



206 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

ing of the Eternal. It is by complete obedience to 
this exacting love, doing difficult and unselfish 
things, giving up easy and comfortable things — in 
fact by living, living hard on the highest levels — that 
men more and more deeply feel, experience, and enter 
into their spiritual life. This is a fact which must 
seem rather awkward to those who put forward 
pathological explanations of it. And on the other 
hand it is only by constant contacts with and re- 
course to the energizing life of Spirit, that this hard 
vocation can be fulfilled. Such a power of reference 
to Reality, of transcending the world of succession 
and its values, can be cultivated by us; and this edu- 
cation of our inborn aptitude is a chief function of 
the discipline of prayer. True, it is only in times 
of recollection or of great emotion that this pro- 
found contact is fully present to consciousness. Yet, 
once fully achieved and its obligations accepted by 
us, it continues as a grave melody within our busy 
outward acts : and we must by right direction of our 
deepest instincts so find and feel the Eternal all the 
time, if indeed we are to actualize and incarnate it 
all the time. From this truth of experience, re- 
ligion has deduced the doctrine of grace, and the 
general conception of man as able to do nothing 
of himself. This need hardly surprise us. For 
equally on the physical plane man can do nothing 
of himself, if he be cut off from his physical sources 
of power; from food to eat, and air to breathe. 
Therefore the fact that his spiritual life too is de- 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 207 

pendent upon the life-giving atmosphere that pene- 
trates him, and the heavenly food which he re- 
ceives, makes no fracture in his experience. Thus 
we are brought back by another path to the funda- 
mental need for him, in some form, of the balanced 
active and contemplative life. 

In spite of this, many people seem to take it 
for granted that if a man^ beHeves in and desires 
to live a spiritual life, he can live it in utter inde- 
pendence of spiritual food. He believes in God, 
loves his neighbour, wants to do good, and just 
goes ahead. The result of this is that the life of 
the God-fearing citizen or the Social Christian, as 
now conceived and practised, is generally the starved 
life. It leaves no time for the silence, the with- 
drawal, the quiet attention to the spiritual, which 
is essential if it is to develop all its powers. Yet 
the literature of the Spirit is full of warnings on 
this subject. Taste and see that the Lord is sweet. 
They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their 
stfength. In quietness and confidence shall be your 
strength. These are practical statements; ad- 
dressed, not to specialists but to ordinary men and 
women, with a normal psycho-physical make-up. 
They are literally true now, or can be if we choose. 
They do not involve any peculiar training, or un- 
natural effort. A sliding scale goes from the 
simplest prayer-experience of the ordinary man to 
that complete self-loss and complete self-finding, 
which is called the transforming union of the saint; 



208 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

and somewhere In this series, every human soul can 
find a place. 

If this balanced life is to be ours, if we are to re- 
ceive what St. Augustine called the food of the full- 
grown, to find and feel the Eternal, we must give 
time and place to it In our lives. I emphasize this, 
because its realization seems to me to be a desperate 
modern need; a need exhibited supremely in our 
languid and ineffectual spirituality, but also felt in 
the too busy, too entirely active and hurried lives of 
the artist, the reformer and the teacher. St. John 
of the Cross says in one of his letters: "What is 
wanting Is not writing or talking — there Is more 
than enough of that — but, silence and action. For 
silence joined to action produces recollection, and 
gives the spirit a marvellous strength." Such rec- 
ollection, such a gathering up of our Interior forces 
and retreat of consciousness to its "ground," is the 
preparation of all great endeavour, whatever Its 
apparent object may be. Until we realize that it 
Is better, more useful, more productive of strength, 
to spend, let us say, the odd ten minutes in the morn- 
ing In feeling and finding the Eternal than in flick- 
ing the newspaper — that this will send us off to the 
"day's work properly orientated, gathered together, 
recollected, and really endowed with new power of 
dealing with circumstance — we have not begun to 
live the life of the Spirit, or grasped the practical 
connection between such a daily discipline and the 
power of doing our best work, whatever it may be. 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 209 

I will Illustrate this from a living example: that 
of the Sadhu Sundar Singh. No one, I suppose, 
who came into personal contact with the Sadhu, 
doubted that they were In the presence of a person 
who was living, in the full sense, the spiritual life. 
Even those who could not accept the symbols in 
which he described his experience and asked others 
to share it, acknowledged that there had been 
worked in him a great transformation; that the 
sense of the abiding and eternal went with him 
everywhere, and flowed out from him, to calm and 
to correct our feverish lives. He fully satisfies in 
his own person the demands of Baron von Hiigel's 
definition : both contact with and renunciation of the 
Particular and Fleeting, seeking and finding of the 
Eternal, incarnating within his own experience that 
transcendent Otherness. Now the Sadhu has dis- 
covered for himself and practises as the condition 
of his extraordinary activity, power and endurance, 
just that balance of life which St. Benedict's rule 
ordained. He is a wandering missionary, con- 
stantly undertaking great journeys, enduring hard- 
ship and dangef, and practising the absolute pov- 
erty of St. Francis. He is perfectly healthy, strong, 
extraordinarily attractive, full of power. But this 
power he Is careful to nourish. His irreducible 
minimum is two hours spent In meditation and word- 
less communication with God at the beginning of 
each day. He prefers three or four hours when 
work permits; and a long period of prayer and 



210 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

meditation always precedes his public address. If 
forced to curtail or hurry these hours of prayer, he 
feels restless and unhappy, and his efficiency is re- 
duced. "Prayer," he says, "is as important as 
breathing; and we never say we have no time to 
breathe." ^ 

All this has been explained away by critics of the 
muscular Christian sort, who say that the Sadhu's 
Christianity Is of a typically Eastern kind. But 
this is simply not true. It were much better to 
acknowledge that we, more and more, are tending 
to develop a typically Western kind of Christianity, 
marked by the Western emphasis on doing and 
Western contempt for being; and that if we go 
sufficiently far on this path we shall find ourselves 
cut off from our source. The Sadhu's Christianity 
is fully Christian; that is to say, it is whole and com- 
plete. The power in which he does his works is 
that in which St. Paul carried through his heroic 
missionary career, St. Benedict formed a spiritual 
family that transformed European culture, Wesley 
made the whole world his parish, Elizabeth Fry 
faced the Newgate criminals. It is idle to talk of 
the revival of a personal spiritual life among our- 
selves, or of a spiritual regeneration of society — 
for this can only come through the individual re- 
making of each of its members — unless we are will- 
ing, at the sacrifice of some personal convenience, 
to make a place and time for these acts of recollec- 

1 "Streeter and Appasamy: "The Sadhu," pp. 98, 100 et seq., 213. 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 211 

tlon; this willing and loving — and even more fruit- 
ful, the more willing and loving — communion with, 
response to Reality, to God. It Is true that a fully 
lived spiritual life Involves far more than this. But 
this is the only condition on which It will exist at 
all. 

Love then, which Is a willed tendency to God; 
prayer, which Is willed communion with and ex- 
perience of Him; are the two prime essentials In 
the personal life of the Spirit. They represent, of 
course, only our side of it and our obligation. This 
love is the outflowing response to another inflow- 
ing love, and this prayer the appropriation of a 
transcendental energy and grace. As the "German 
Theology"* reminds us, "I cannot do the work with- 
out -God, and God may not or will not without 
me." ^ And by these acts alone, faithfully carried 
through, all their costly demands fulfilled, all their 
gifts and applications accepted without resistance 
and applied to each aspect of life, human nature 
can grow up to its full stature, and obtain access 
to all its sources of power. 

Yet this personal Inward life of love and prayer 
shall not be too solitary. As it needs links with 
cultus and so with the lives of its fellows, it also 
needs links with history and so with the living past. 
These links are chiefly made by the individual 
through his reading; and such reading — such ac- 
cess to humanity's hoarded culture and experience 

1 'Theologia Germanica," Cap. III. 



212 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

— has always been declared alike by Christian and 
non-Christian asceticism to be one of the proper 
helps of the spiritual life. Though Hoffding per- 
haps exaggerates when he reminds us that mediaeval 
art always depicts the saints as deeply absorbed in 
their books, and suggests that such brooding study 
directly Induces contemplative states, ^ yet It is true 
that the soul gains greatly from such communion 
with, and meek learning from, Its cultural back- 
ground. Ever more and more as It advances, it 
will discover within that background the records of 
those very experiences which It must now so 
poignantly relive; and which seem to It, as his 
own experience seems to every lover, unique. There 
it can find, without any betrayal of its secret, the 
wholesome assurance of its own normality; stand- 
ards of comparison; companionship, alike in Its 
hours of penitence, of light, and of deprivation. 
Yet such fruitful communion with the past Is not 
the privilege of an aristocratic culture. It Is seen 
in Its perfection in many simple Christians who 
have found in the Bible all the spiritual food they 
need. The great literature of the Spirit tells Its 
secrets to those alone who thus meet It on its own 
ground. Not only the works of Thomas a Kempis, 
of Ruysbroeck, or of St. Teresa, but also the Bibli- 
cal writers — and especially, perhaps, the Psalms 
and the Gospels — are read wholly anew by us at 
each stage of our advance. Comparative study of 

1 Hoffding, "The Philosophy of Religion," III, B. 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 213 

Hindu and Moslem writers proves that tEis Is 
equally true of the great literatures of other faiths.^ 
Beginners may find in all these Infinite stimulus, In- 
terest, and beauty. But to the mature soul they 
become road-books, of which experience proves the 
astonishing exactitude; giving it descriptions which 
It can recognize and directions that it needs, and 
constituting a steady check upon Individualism. 

Now let us look at the emergence of this life 
which we have been considering, and at the typical 
path which It will or may follow, In an ordinary 
man or woman of our own day. Not a saint or 
genius, reaching heroic levels; but a member of 
that solid wholesome spiritual population which 
ought to fill the streets of the City of God. We 
noticed when we were studying its appearance In 
history, that often this life begins In a sort of rest- 
lessness, a feeling that there Is something more In 
existence, some absolute meaning, some more search- 
ing obligation, that we have not reached. This 
dissatisfaction, this uncertainty and hunger, may 
show Itself in many different forms. It may speak 
first to the intellect, to the moral nature, to the 
social conscience, even to the artistic faculty; or, 
directly, to the heart. Anyhow, its abiding quality 
is a sense of contraction, of limitation; a feeling 
of something more that we could stretch out to, 
and achieve, and be. Its Impulsion is always in one 

1 There are, for instance, several striking instances in the Auto- 
biography of the Maharishi Devendranath Tagore. 



214 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

direction; to a finding of some wider and more en- 
durmg reality, some objective for the self's life and 
love. It is a seeking of the Eternal, in some form. I 
allow that thanks to the fog in which we live muffled, 
such a first seeking, and above all such a finding 
of the Eternal is not for us a very easy thing. 
The sense of quest, of disillusion, of something 
lacking, is more common among modern men than 
its resolution in discovery. Nevertheless the qu-est 
does mean that there is a solution: and that 
those who are persevering must find it in the end. 
The world into which our desire is truly turned, is 
somehow revealed to us. The revelation, always 
partial and relative, is of course conditioned by 
our capacity, the character of our longing and the 
experiences of our past. In spiritual matters we 
behold that which we are: here following, on 
higher levels, the laws which govern aesthetic ap- 
prehension. 

So, dissatisfied with its world-view and realizing 
that it is incomplete, the self seeks at first hand, 
though not always with clear consciousness of its 
nature, the Reality which is the object of religion. 
When it finds this Reality, the discover)^ however 
partial, is for it the overwhelming revelation of an 
objective Fact; and it is swept by a love and awe 
which it did not know itself to possess. And now 
it sees, dimly, yet in a sufficiently disconcerting way, 
the Pattern in the Mount; the rich complex of 
existence as it were transmuted, full of charity and 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 215 

beauty, governed by another series of adjustments. 
Life looks different to it. As Fox said, "Creation 
gives out another smell than before." ^ There is 
only one thing more disconcerting than this, and 
that is seeing the pattern actualized in a fellow- 
human being: living face to face with human 
sanctity, in Its great simplicity and supernatural 
love, joy, peace. For, when we glimpse Eternal 
Beauty In the universe, we can say with the hero 
of "Callista," "It is beyond me!" But, when we 
see It transfiguring human character, we know that 
it Is not beyond the power of the race. It is here, 
to be had. Its existence as a form of life creates 
a standard, and lays an obligation on us all. 

Suppose then that the self, urged by this new 
pressure, accepts the obligation and measures itself 
by the standard. It then becomes apparent that 
this Fact which It sought for and has seen Is not 
merely added to Its old universe, as In mediaeval 
pictures Paradise with Its circles over-arches the 
earth. This Reality Is all-penetrating and has 
transfigured each aspect of the self's old world. It 
now has a new and most exacting scale of values, 
which demand from It a new series of adjustments; 
ask It — and with authority — to change its life. 

What next? The next thing, probably, Is that 
the self finds itself In rather a tight place. It is 
wedged into a physical order that makes Innumer- 
able calls on it, and Innumerable suggestions to It: 

1 "Fox's Journal," Vol. I, Cap. 2. 



216 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

which has for years monopolized its field of con- 
sciousness and set up habits of response to its claims. 
It has to make some kind of a break with this order, 
or at least with its many attachments thereto; and 
stretch to the wider span demanded by the new and 
larger world. And further, it is in possession of 
a complex psychic life, containing many insubor- 
dinate elements, many awkward bequests from a 
primitive past. That psychic life has just received 
the powerful and direct suggestion of the Spirit; 
and for the moment, It Is subdued to that sugges- 
tion. But soon it begins to experience the Inevi- 
table conflict between old habits and new demands 
— between a life lived In the particular and in the 
universal spirit — and only through complete resolu- 
tion of that conflict will it develop Its full power. 
So the self quickly realizes that the theologian's war 
between Nature and Grace Is a picturesque way of 
stating a real situation; and further that the de- 
mand of all religions for a change of heart — that 
is, of the deep instinctive nature — Is the first con- 
dition of a spiritual life. And hence, that Its hands 
are fairly full. It is true that an immense joy and 
hope come with it to this business of tackling im- 
perfection, of adjusting itself to the newly found 
centre of life. It knows that it Is committed to 
the forward movement of a Power, which may be 
slow but which nothing can gainsay. Neverthe- 
less the first thing that power demands from It is 
courage; and the next an unremitting vigorous effort. 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 217 

It will never again be able to sink back cosily into 
its racial past. Consciousness of disharmony and 
Incompleteness now brings the obligation to mend 
the disharmony and achieve a fresh synthesis. 

This is felt with a special sharpness in the moral 
life, where the Irfeconcilable demands of natural 
self-interest and of Spirit assume their most intract- 
able shape. Old habits and paths of discharge 
which have almost become automatic must now, it 
seems, be abandoned. New paths, in spite of resist- 
ances, must be made. Thus it is that temptation, 
hard conflict, and bewildering perplexities usher in 
the life of the Spirit. These are largely the re- 
sults of our biological past continuing into our 
fluctuating half-made present; and they point to- 
wards a psychic stability, an Inner unity we have not 
yet attained. 

This realization of ourselves as we truly are — 
emerging with difficulty from our animal origin, 
tinctured through and through with the self-regard- 
ing tendencies and habits it has Imprinted on us — 
this realization or self-knowledge, is Humility; the 
only soil in which the spiritual life can germinate. 
And modern man with his great horizons, his ever 
clearer vision of his own close kinship with life's 
origin, his small place in the time-stream, in the 
universe. In God's hand, the relative character of 
his best knowledge and achleve-ment, is surely every- 
where being persuaded to this royal virtue. Recog- 
nition of this his true creaturely status, with its ob- 



218 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

ligations — the only process of pain and struggle 
needed if the demands of generous love are ever to 
be fulfilled in him and his many-levelled nature is 
to be purified and harmonized and develop all its 
powers — this is Repentance. He shows not only 
his sincerity, but his manliness and courage by his 
acceptance of all that such repentance entails on 
him; for the healthy soul, like the healthy body, 
welcomes some trial and roughness and is well able 
to bear the pains of education. Psychologists re- 
gard such an education, harmonizing the rational 
or Ideal with the instinctive life — the change of 
heart which leaves the whole self working together 
without inner conflict towards one objective — as the 
^•cry condition of a full and healthy life. But It 
can only be achieved in Its perfection by the com- 
plete surrender of heart and mind to a third term, 
transcending alike the Impulsive and the rational. 
The life of the Spirit in Its supreme authority, and 
its identification with the highest interests of the 
race, does this: harnessing man's fiery energies to 
the service of the Light. 

Therefore, in the rich, new life on which the self 
enters, one strand must be that of repentance, 
catharsis, self-conquest: a complete contrition which 
is the earnest of complete generosity, uncalculated 
response. And, dealing as we are now with aver- 
age human nature, we can safely say that the need 
for such ever-renewed self-scrutiny and self-purga- 
tion will never In this life be left behind. For sin 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 219 

is a fact, though a fact which we do not under- 
stand; and now it appears and must evermore re- 
main an offence against love, hostile to this intense 
new attraction, and marring the self's willed ten- 
dency towards it. 

The next strand we may perhaps call that of 
Recollection: for the r'ecognizing and the cure of 
imperfection depends on the compensating search 
for the Perfect and its enthronement as the supreme 
object of our thought and love. The self, then^ 
soon begins to feel a strong impulsion to some type 
of inward withdrawal and concentration, some kind 
of prayer; though it may not use this name or recog- 
nize the character of its mood. As it yields to this 
strange new drawing, such recollection grows easier. 
It finds that there is a veritable inner world, not 
merely of phantasy, but of profound heart-search- 
ing experience; where the soul is in touch with an- 
other order of realities and knows itself to be an 
inheritor of Eternal Life. Here unique things hap- 
pen. A power is at work, and new apprehensions 
are born. And now for the first time the self dis- 
covers itself to be striking a balance between this 
inner and the outer life, and in its own small way 
— but still, most fruitfully — enriching action with 
the fruits of contemplation. If it will give to the 
learning of this new art — to the disciplining and 
refining of this affective thought — even a fraction of 
the diligence which it gives to the learning of a 
new game, it will find itself repaid by a progressive 



220 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

purity of vision, a progressive sense of assurance, 
an ever-increasing delicacy of moral discrimination 
and demand. Psychologists, as we have seen, divide 
men into introverts and extroverts; but as a matter 
of fact we must regard both these extreme types 
as defective. A whole man should be supple In 
his reactions both to the inner and to the outer 
world. 

The third strand In the life of the Spirit, for 
this normal self which we are considering, must be 
the disposition of complete Surrender. More and 
more advancing in this inner life, it will feel the 
imperative attraction of Reality, of God; and it 
must respond to this attraction with all the courage 
and generosity of which It is capable. I am try- 
ing to use the simplest and the most general 
language, and to avoid emotional imagery: though 
It is here, In telling of this perpetually renewed 
act of self-giving and dedication, that spiritual 
writers most often have recourse to the language of 
the heart. It is Indeed In a spirit of intensest and 
most humble adoration that generous souls yield 
themselves to the drawing of that mysterious Beauty 
and unchanging Love, with all that It entails. But 
the form which the Impulse to surrender takes will 
vary with the psychic make-up of the individual. 
To some it will come as a sense of vocation, a 
making-over of the will to the purposes of the 
Kingdom; a type of consecration which may not 
be overtly religious, but may be concerned with the 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 221 

self-forgetting quest of social excellence, of beauty, 
or of truth. By some it will be felt as an illumina- 
tion of the mind, which now discerns once for all 
true values, and accepting these, must uphold and 
strive for them in the teeth of all opportunism. 
By some — and these are the most blessed — as a 
breaking and re-making of the heart. Whatever 
the form it takes, the extent in which the self ex- 
periences the peace, joy and power of living at the 
level of Spirit will depend on the completeness and 
singlemindedness of this, its supreme act of self- 
simplification. Any reserves, anything in its make- 
up which sets up resistances — and this means gen- 
erally any form of egotism — will mar the harmony 
of the process. And on the other hand, such a 
real simplification of the self's life as is here de- 
manded — uniting on one object, the intellect, will 
and feeling too often split among contradictory at- 
tractions — is itself productive of inner harmony and 
increased power: productive too of that noble en- 
durance which counts no pain too much in the serv- 
ice of Reality; 

Here then we come to the fact, valid for every 
level of spiritual life, which lies behind all the dec- 
larations concerning surrender, self-loss, dying to 
live, dedication, made by writers on this theme. All 
involve a relaxing of tension, letting ourselves go 
without reluctance in the direction in which we are 
most profoundly drawn ; a cessation of ouf struggles 
with the tide, our kicks against the pricks that spur 



222 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

us on. The Inward aim of the self is towards uni- 
fication with a larger life; a mergence with Reality 
which it may describe under various contradictory 
symbols, or may not be able to describe at all, but 
which it feels to be the fulfilment of existence. It 
has learnt — though this knowledge may not have 
passed beyond the stage of feeling — that the uni- 
verse is one simple texture, in which all things have 
their explanation and their place. Combing out the 
confusions which enmesh it, losing its sham and 
separate life and finding its true life there, it will 
know what to love and how to act. The goal of 
this process, which has been called entrance into the 
freedom of the Will of God, is the state described 
by the writer of the "German Theology" when he 
said "I would fain be to the Eternal Goodness what 
his own hand is to a man." ^ For such a declara- 
tion not only means a willed and skilful working 
for God, a practical siding with Perfection, be- 
coming its living tool, but also close union with, and 
sharing of, the vital energy of the spiritual order: 
a feeding on and using of its power, its very life 
blood, complete docility to its inward direction, ab- 
olition of separate desire. The surrender is there- 
fore made not in order that we may become limp 
pietists, but in order that we may receive more en- 
ergy and do better work: by a humble self-subjec- 
tion more perfectly helping forward the thrust of 
the Spirit and the primal human business of In- 

1 "Theologia Germanica," Cap. lo. 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 223 

carnating the Eternal here and now. Its justifica- 
tion is in the arduous but untiring, various but har- 
monious, activities that flow from it: the enhance- 
ment of life which it entails. It gives us access to 
our real sources of power; that we may take from 
them and, spending generously, be energized anew. 

So the cord on which those events which make 
up the personal life of the Spirit are to be strung 
is completed, and we see that it consists of four 
strands. Two are dispositions of the self; Peni- 
tence and Surrender. Two are activities; inward 
Recollection and outward Work. All four make 
stern demands on its fortitude and goodwill. And 
each gives strength to the rest: for they are not to 
be regarded as separate and successive states, a dis- 
crete series through which we must pass one 
by one, leaving penitence behind us when we 
reach surrendered love; but as the variable yet en- 
during and inseparable aspects of one rich life, 
phases in one complete and vital effort to respond 
more and more closely to Reality. 

Nothing, perhaps, is less monotonous than the 
personal life of the Spirit. In its humility and joy- 
ous love, its adoration and its industry, it may find 
self-expression in any one of the countless activities 
of the world of time. It is both romantic and aus- 
tere, both adventurous and holy. Full of fluctua- 
tion and unearthly colour, it yet has its dark patches 
as well as its light. Since perfect proof of the 
supersensualis beyond the span of human conscious- 



224 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

ness, the element of risk can never be eliminated: 
we are obliged in the end to trust the universe and 
live by faith. Therefore the awakened soul must 
often suffer perplexity, share to the utmost the 
stress and anguish of the physical order; and, 
chained as it is to a consciousness accustomed to 
respond to that order, must still be content with 
flashes of understanding and wiljing to bear long 
periods of destitution when the light is veiled. 

The further it advances the more bitter will these 
periods of destitution seem to it. It is not from 
the real men and women of the Spirit that we hear 
soft things about the comfort of faith. For the 
true life of faith gives everything worth having and 
takes everything worth offering: with unrelenting 
blows it welds the self into the stuff of the universe, 
subduing it to the universal purpose, doing away 
with the flame of separation. Though joy and 
inward peace even in desolation are dominant marks 
of those who have grown up into it, still it offers 
to none a succession of supersensual delights. The 
life of the Spirit involves the sublimation of that 
pleasure-pain rhythm which is characteristic of nor- 
mal consciousness, and if for it pleasure becomes 
joy, pain becomes the Cross. Toil, abnegation, 
sacrifice, are therefore of its essence; but these are 
not felt as a heavy burden, because they are the ex- 
pression of love. It entails a willed tension and 
choice, a noble power of refusal, which are not en- 
tirely covered by being *'in tune with the Infinite.'* 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 225 

As our life comes to maturity we discover to our con- 
fusion that human ears can pick up from the Infinite 
many incompatible tunes, but cannot hear the whole 
symphony. And the melody confided to our care, 
the one which we alone perhaps can contribute and 
which taxes our powers to the full, has in it not 
only the notes of triumph but the notes of pain. 
The distinctive mark therefore is not happiness but 
vocation: work demanded and power given, but 
given only on condition that we spend it and our- 
selves on others without stint. These propositions, 
of course, are easily illustrated from history: but 
we can also illustrate them in our own persons if 
we choose. 

Should we choose this, and should life of the Spirit 
be achieved by us — and it will only be done through 
daily discipline and attention to the Spiritual, 
a sacrifice of comfort to its interests, following up 
the intuition which sets us on the path — what bene- 
fits may we as ordinary men expect it to bring to 
us and to the community that we serve? It will 
certainly bring into life new zest and new meaning; 
a widening of the horizon and consciousness of se- 
curity; a fresh sense of joys to be had and of work 
to be done. The real spiritual consciousness is 
positive and constructive in type : it does not look 
back on the past sins and mistakes of the individual 
or of the community, but in its other-world faith 
and this-world charity is inspired by a forward- 
moving spirit of hope. Seeking alone the honour 



226 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

of Eternal Beauty, and because of its Invulnerable 
sense of security, it is adventurous. The spiritual 
man and woman can afford to take desperate 
chances, and live dangerously in the interests of 
their ideals; being delivered from the many un- 
real fears and anxieties which commonly torment 
us, and knowing the unimportance of possessions 
and of so-called success. The joy which waits on 
disinterested love and the confidence which follows 
surrender, cannot fail them. Moreover, the in- 
ward harmony and assurance, the consciousness of 
access to that Spirit who is in a literal sense 
"health's eternal spring" means a healing of nerv- 
ous miseries, and invigoration of the usually ill- 
treated mind and body, and so an all-round in- 
crease in happiness and power. 

*'The fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, long 
suffering, gentleness, goodness, faith, meekness, 
temperance." This, said St. Paul, who knew by 
experience the worlds of grace and of nature, is 
what a complete man ought to be like. Compare 
this picture of an equable and fully harmonized per- 
sonality with that of a characteristic neurasthenic, 
a bored sensualist, or an embittered worker, con- 
centrated on the struggle for a material advantage: 
and consider that the central difference between 
these types of human success and human failure 
abides in the presence or absence of a spiritual con- 
ception of life. We do not yet know the limits of 
the upgrowth into power and happiness which com- 



LIFE OF SPIRIT IN THE INDIVIDUAL 227 

plete and practical surrender to this conception can 
work in us; or what Its general triumph might do 
for the transformation of the world. And it may 
even be that beyond the joy and renewal which come 
from self-conquest and unification, a level of spirit- 
ual life most certainly open to all who will really 
work for It; and beyond that deeper Insight, more 
widespreading love, and perfection of adjustment 
to the here-and-now which we recognize and rever- 
ence as the privilege of the pure in heart — ^beyond 
all these, it may be that life still reserves for man 
another secret and another level of consciousness; 
a closer identification with Reality, such as eye hatli 
not seen, or ear heard. 

And note, that this spiritual life which we have 
here considered Is not an aristocratic life. It Is 
a life of which the fundamentals are given by the 
simplest kinds of traditional piety, and have been 
exhibited over and over again by the simplest souls. 
An unconditional self-surrender to the Divine Will, 
under whatever symbols It may be thought of; for 
we know that the very crudest of symbols is often 
strong enough to make a bridge between the heart 
and the Eternal, and so be a vehicle of the Spirit 
of Life. A little silence and leisure. A great deal 
of faithfulness, kindness, and courage. All this is 
within the reach of anyone who cares enough for 
it to pay the price. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 

In the past six chapters we have been consider- 
ing in the main our own position, and how, here 
in the present, we as adults may actualize and help 
on the spiritual life in ourselves. But our best hope 
of giving Spirit its rightful, full expression within the 
time-world lies in the future. It is towards that, 
that those who really care must work. Anything 
which we can do towards persuading into better 
shape our own deformed characters, compelling 
our recalcitrant energy into fresh channels, Is little 
in comparison with what might be achieved in the 
plastic growing psychic life of children did we ap- 
preciate our full opportunity and the importance of 
using it. This is why I propose now to consider 
one or two points in the relation of education to the 
spiritual life. 

Since it is always well, In a discussion of this kind, 
to be quite clear about the content of the words with 
which we deal, I will say at once, that by Education 
I mean that deliberate adjustment of the whole en- 
vironment of a growing creature, which surrounds it 
with the most favourable influences and educes all 
its powers; giving It the most helpful conditions for 

228 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 229 

its full growth and development. Education should 
be the complete preparation of the young thing for 
fullness of life; involving the evolution and the 
balanced training of all its faculties, bodily, mental 
and spiritual. It should train and refine senses, 
instincts, intellect, will and feeling; giving a world- 
view based on real facts and real values and encour- 
aging active correspondence therewith. Thus the ed- 
ucationist, if he be convinced, as I think most of us 
must be, that all isn't quite right with the world of 
mankind, has the priceless opportunity of beginning 
the remaking of humanity from the right end. In 
the child he has a little, supple thing, which can be 
made into a vital, spiritual thing; and nothing again 
will count so much for It as what happens In these 
Its earliest years. To start life straight Is the secret 
of Inward happiness : and to a- great extent, the se- 
cret of health and power. 

That conception of man upon which we have been 
working, and which regards his psychic life on all its 
levels as the manifold expressions of one single en- 
ergy or urge in the depths of his being, a life-force 
seeking fulfilment, has obvious and Important appli- 
cations In the educational sphere. It Indicates that 
the fundamental business of education is to deal 
with this urgent and untempered craving, discipline 
It, and direct it towards interests of permanent value : 
helping it to establish useful habits, removing obsta- 
cles In its path, blocking the side channels down which 
it might run. Especially Is It the task of such edii- 



230 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

cation, gradually to disclose to the growing psyche 
those spiritual correspondences for which the reli- 
gious man and the idealist must hold that man's 
spirit was made. Such an education as this has 
little in common with the mere crude imparting of 
facts. It represents rather the careful and loving 
induction of the growing human creature into the 
rich world of experience; the help we give It In the 
great business of adjusting itself to reality. It 
operates by means of the moulding influences of en- 
vironment, the creation of habit. Suggestion, not 
statement, is its most potent instrument; and such 
suggestion begins for good or ill at the very dawn 
of consciousness. Therefore the child whose In- 
fancy Is not surrounded by persons of true outlook 
Is handicapped from the start; and the training In 
this respect of the parents of the future is one of the 
greatest services we can render to the race. 

We are beginning to learn the overwhelming im- 
portance of infantile impressions: how a forgotten 
babyish fear or grief may develop underground, 
and produce at last an unrecognizable growth poi- 
soning the body and the mind of the adult. But 
here good is at least as potent as ill. What terror, 
a hideous sight, an unloving nurture may do for evil; 
a happy Impression, a beautiful sight, a loving nur- 
ture will do for good. Moreover, we can bury 
good- seed in the unconscious minds of children and 
reasonably look forward to the fruit. Babyish 
prayers, simple hymns, trace whilst the mind Is due- 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 231 

tile the paths In which feelings shall afterwards 
tend to flow; and it Is only In maturity that we real- 
ize our psychological debt to these early and perhaps 
afterwards abandoned beliefs and deeds. So the 
veritable education of the Spirit begins at once, In 
the cradle, and its chief means will be the surround- 
ings within which that childish spirit first develops 
its little awareness of the universe ; the appeals which 
are made to its instincts, the stimulations of its life 
of sense. The first factor of this education Is the 
family: the second the society within which that 
family is formed. 

Though we no longer suppose it to possess innate 
ideas, the baby has most surely innate powers. Incli- 
nations and curiosities, and is reaching out in every 
direction towards life. It is brimming with will 
power, ready to push hard Into experience. The 
environment In which It Is placed and the responses 
which the outer world makes to it — and these sur- 
roundings and responses in the long run are largely 
of our choosing and making — represent either the 
helping or thwarting of its tendencies, and the sum 
total of the directions In which its powers can be 
exercised and its demands satisfied: the possibilities, 
In fact, which life puts before it. We, as individ- 
uals and as a community, control and form part of 
this environment. Under the first head, we play by 
influence or demeanour a certain part In the educa- 
tion of every child whom we meet. Under the sec- 
ond head, by acquiescence in the social order, we ac- 



232 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

cept responsibility for the state of life in which it 
is born. The child's first intimations of the spirit- 
ual must and can only come to it through the in- 
carnation of Spirit in its home and the world that 
it knows. What, then, are we doing about this? 
It means that the influences which shape the men 
and women of the future will be as wholesome and 
as spiritual as we ourselves are: no more, no less. 
Tone, atmosphere are the things which really mat- 
ter; and these are provided by the group-mind, and 
reflect its spiritual state. 

The child's whole educational opportunity is con- 
tained in two factors; the personality it brings and 
the environment it gets. Generations of education- 
ists have disputed their relative importance: but 
neither party can deny that the most fortunate na- 
ture, given wrongful or insufficient nurture, will 
hardly emerge unharmed. Even great inborn 
powers atrophy if left unused, and exceptional abil- 
ity in any direction may easily remain undeveloped 
if the environment be sufficiently unfavourable: a 
result too often achieved in the domain of the spir- 
itual life. We must have opportunity and en- 
couragement to try our powers and inclinations, be 
helped to understand their nature and the way to 
use them, unless we are to begin again, each one of 
us, in the Stone Age of the soul. So too, even small 
powers may be developed to an astonishing degree 
by suitable surroundings and wise education — wit- 
ness the results obtained by the expert training of 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 233 

defective children — and all this Is as applicable to 
the spiritual as to the mental and bodily life. That 
life is quick to respond to the demands made on it: 
to take every opportunity of expression that comes 
its way. If you make the right appeal to any human 
faculty, that faculty will respond, and begin to grow. 
Thus It Is that the slow quiet pressure of tradition, 
first in the home and then in the school, shapes the 
child during his most malleable years. We, there- 
fore, are surely bound to watch and criticize the 
environment, the tradition, the customs we are in- 
strumental In providing for the Infant future : to ask 
ourselves whether we are sure the tradition is right, 
the conventions we hand on useful, the ideal we hold 
up complete. The child, whatever his powers, can- 
not react to something which is not there; he can't 
digest food that is not given to him, use faculties 
for which no objective is provided. Hence the 
great responsibility of our generation, as to pro- 
viding a complete, balanced environment nowy a 
fully-rounded opportunity of response to life physi- 
cal, mental and spiritual, for the generation pre- 
paring to succeed us. Such education as this has 
been called a preparation for citizenship. But this 
conception Is too narrow, unless the citizenship be 
that of the City of God; and the adjustments In- 
volved be those of the spirit, as well as of the body 
and the mind. 

Herbert Spencer, whom one would hardly accuse 
of being a spiritual philosopher, was accustomed to 



234 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

group the essentials of a right education under four 
heads: ^ 

First, he said, we must teach self-preservation in 
all senses: how to keep the body and the mind 
healthy and efficient, how to be self-supporting, how 
to protect oneself against external dangers and en- 
croachments. 

Next, we must train the growing creature in Its 
duties towards the life of the future: parenthood 
and its responsibilities, understood In the widest 
sense. 

Thirdly, we must prepare It to take Its place In 
the present as a member of the social order Into 
which it Is born. 

Last: we must hand on to it all those refinements 
of life which the past has given to us — the hoarded 
culture of the race. 

Only If we do these four things thoroughly can 
we dare to call ourselves educators in the full sense 
of the word. 

Now, turning to the spiritual interests of the 
child: — and unless we are crass materialists we must 
believe these interests to exist, and to be paramount 
— what are we doing to further them In these four 
fundamental directions? First, does the average 
good education train our young people in spiritual 
self-preservation? Does it send them out equipped 
with the means of living a full and efficient spiritual 
life? Does it furnish them with a health-giving 

1 Spencer: "Education," Cap. i. 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 235 

type of religion; that is, a solid hold on eternal reali- 
ties, a view of the universe capable of withstand- 
ing hostile criticism, of supporting them In times of 
difficulty and of stress? Secondly, does it give them 
a spiritual outlook in respect of their racial duties, 
fit them In due time to be parents of other souls? 
Does it train them to regard humanity, and their 
own place In the human life-stream, from this point 
of view? This point Is of special importance, In 
view of the fact that racial and biological knowledge 
on lower levels Is now so generally In the possession 
of boys and girls; and Is bound to produce a dis- 
torted conception of life, unless the spirit be studied 
by them with at least the same respectful attention 
that Is given to the flesh. Thirdly, what does our 
education do towards preparing them to solve the 
problems of social and economic life In a spiritual 
sense — our only reasonable chance of extracting the 
next generation from the social muddle in which we 
are plunged to-day? Last, to what extent do we 
try to introduce our pupils into a full enjoyment 
of their spiritual inheritance, the culture and tradi- 
tion of the past? 

I do not deny that there are educators — chiefly 
perhaps educators of girls — who can give favour- 
able answers to all these questions. But they are 
exceptional, the proportion of the child population 
whom they influence Is small, and frequently their 
proceedings are looked upon — not without some 
justice — as eccentric. If then in all these depart- 



236 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

merits our standard type of education stops short of 
the spiritual level, are not we self-convicted as at 
best theoretical believers in the worth and destiny of 
the human soul? 

Consider the facts. Outside the walls of definitely 
religious institutions — where methods are not al- 
ways adjusted to the common stuff and needs of con- 
temporary human life — it does not seem to occur to 
many educationists to give the education of the 
child's soul the same expert delicate attention so 
lavishly bestowed on the body and the intellect. 
By expert delicate attention I do not mean persis- 
tent religious instruction; but a skilled and loving 
care for the growing spirit, inspired by deep con- 
viction and helped by all the psychological knowl- 
edge we possess. If we look at the efforts of or- 
ganized religion we are bound to admit that in 
thousands of rural parishes, and in many towns too, 
it is still possible to grow from infancy to old age as 
a member of church or chapel without once re- 
ceiving any first-hand teaching on the powers and 
needs of the soul or the technique of prayer; or ob- 
taining any more help in the great religious difficul- 
ties of adolescence than a general invitation to be- 
lieve, and trust God. Morality — that is to say cor- 
rectness of response to our neighbour and our tem- 
poral surroundings — is often well taught. Spirit- 
uality — correctness of response to God and our 
eternal surroundings — is most often ignored. A 
peculiar British bashfulness seems to stand in the 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 237 

way of it. It is felt that we show better taste in 
leaving the essentials of the soul's development to 
chance, even that such development is not wholly 
desirable or manly: that the atrophy of one aspect 
of **man's made-trinity" is best. I have heard one 
eminent ecclesiastic maintain that regular and punc- 
tual attendance at morning service in a mood of non- 
comprehending loyalty was the best sort of spiritual 
experience for the average Englishman. Is not 
that a statement which should make the Christian 
teachers who are responsible for the average 
Englishman, feel a little bit uncomfortable about 
the type which they have produced? I do not sug- 
gest that education should encourage a feverish re- 
ligiosity; but that it ought to produce balanced men 
and women, whose faculties are fully alert and re- 
sponsive to all levels of life. As it is, we train Boy 
Scouts and Girl Guides in the principles of honour 
and chivalry. Our Bible-classes minister to the 
hungry spirit much information about the journeys 
of St. Paul (with maps). But the pupils are sel- 
dom invited or assisted to taste, and see that the 
Lord is sweet. 

Now this indifference means, of course, that we 
do not as educators, as controllers of the racial 
future, really believe in the spiritual foundations of 
our personality as thoroughly and practically we be- 
lieve in its mental and physical manifestations. 
Whatever the philosophy or religion we profess 
may be, it remains for us in the realm of idea, not 



238 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

in the realm of fact. In practice, we do not aim 
at the achievement of a spiritual type of conscious- 
ness as the crown of human culture. The best that 
most education does for our children is only what 
the devil did for Christ. It takes them up to the 
top of a high mountain and shows them all the 
kingdoms of this world; the kingdom of history, 
the kingdom of letters, the kingdom of beauty, the 
kingdom of science. It is a splendid vision, but 
unfortunately fugitive: and since the spirit is 
not fugitive, it demands an objective that is 
permanent. If we do not give it such an ob- 
jective, one of two things must happen to it. Either 
it will be restless and dissatisfied, and throw the 
whole life out of key; or it will become dormant for 
lack of use, and so the whole life will be impover- 
ished, its best promise unfulfilled. One line leads to 
the neurotic, the other to the average sensual man, 
and I think it will be agreed that modern life pro- 
duces a good crop of both these kind of defectives. 
But if we believe that the permanent objective 
of the spirit is God — If He be indeed for us the 
Fountain of Life and the sum of Reality — can we 
acquiesce In these forms of loss? Surely it ought to 
be our first aim, to make the sense of His universal 
presence and transcendent worth, and of the self's 
responsibility to Him, dominant for the plastic 
youthful consciousness confided to our care : to in- 
troduce that consciousness into a world which is 
really a theocracy and encourage its aptitude for 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 239 

generous love? If educationists do not view such 
a proposal with favour, this shows how miserable 
and distorted our common conception of God has 
become; and how small a part it really plays in our 
practical life. Most of us scramble through that 
practical life, and are prepared to let our children 
scramble too, without any clear notions of that 
hygiene of the soul which has been studied for cen- 
turies by experts ; and few look upon this branch of 
self-knowledge as something that all men may pos- 
sess who will submit to education and work for its 
achievement. Thus we have degenerated from the 
mediaeval standpoint; for then at least the necessity 
of spiritual education was understood and accepted, 
and the current psychology was in harmony with it. 
But now there is little attempt to deepen and en- 
large the spiritual faculties, none to encourage their 
free and natural development in the young, or their 
application to any richer world of experience than 
the circle of pious images with which "religious 
education^' generally deals. The result of this is 
seen in the rawness, shallowness and ignorance 
which characterize the attitude of many young 
adults to religion. Their beliefs and their scepti- 
cism alike are often the acceptance or rejection of 
the obsolete. If they be agnostics, the dogmas 
which they reject are frequently theological carica- 
tures. If they be believers, both their religious 
conceptions and their prayers are found on inves- 
tigation still to be of an infantile kind, totally un- 



240 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

related to the interests and outlook of modern men. 
Two facts emerge from the experience of all 
educationists. The first is, that children are 
naturally receptive and responsive; the second, that 
adolescents are naturally idealistic. In both stages, 
the young human creature is full of interests and 
curiosities asking to be satisfied, of energies demand- 
ing expression; and here, in their budding, thrusting 
life — for which we, by our choice of surroundings 
and influence, may provide the objective — is the 
raw material out of which the spiritual humanity 
of the future might be made. The child has already 
within it the living seed wherein all human possibil- 
ities are contained; our part is to give the right soil, 
the shelter, and the watering-can. Spiritual educa- 
tion therefore does not consist in putting into the 
child something which it has not; but in educing and 
sublimating that which it has — in establishing hab- 
its, fostering a trend of growth which shall serve it 
well in later years. Already, all the dynamic in- 
stincts are present, at least in germ; asking for an 
outlet. The will and the emotions, ductile as they 
will never be again, are ready to make full and un- 
graduated response to any genuine appeal to enthu- 
siasm. The imagination will accept the food we 
give, if we give it in the right way. What an op- 
portunity! Nowhere else do we come into such 
direct contact with the plastic stuff of life; never 
again shall we have at our disposal such a fund of 
emotional energy. 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 241 

In the child's dreams and fantasies, In its eager 
hero-worship — later, In the adolescent's fervid 
friendships or devoted loyalty to an adored leader — 
we see the search of the living growing creature for 
more life and love, for an enduring object of devo- 
tion. Do we always manage or even try to give 
It that enduring object, in a form it can accept? 
Yet the responsibility of providing such a presenta- 
tion of belief as shall evoke the spontaneous reac- 
tions of faith and love — for no compulsory Idealism 
ever succeeds — Is definitely laid on the parent and 
the teacher. It is In the enthusiastic imitation of a 
beloved leader that the child or adolescent learns 
best. Were the spiritual life the most real of facts 
to us, did we believe In It as we variously believe In 
athletics, physical science or the arts, surely we 
should spare no effort to turn to Its purposes these 
priceless qualities of youth? Were the mind's com- 
munion with the Spirit of God generally regarded 
as its natural privilege and therefore the first con- 
dition of Its happiness and health, the general 
method and tone of modern education would In- 
evitably differ considerably from that which we 
usually see: and if the life of the Spirit Is to come 
to fruition, here Is one of the points at which ref- 
ormation must begin. When we look at the or- 
dinary practice of modern "civilized" Europe, we 
cannot claim that any noticeable proportion of our 
young people are taught during their docile and Im- 
pressionable years the nature and discipline of their 



242 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

spiritual faculties, in the open and common-sense 
way in which they are taught languages, science, 
music or gymnastics. Yet it is surely a central duty 
of the educator to deepen and enrich to the fullest 
extent possible his pupil's apprehension of the uni- 
verse; and must not all such apprehension move to- 
wards the discovery of that universe as a spiritual 
fact? 

Again, in how many schools is the period of re- 
ligious and idealistic enthusiasm which so commonly 
occurs in adolescence wisely used, skilfully trained, 
and made the foundation of an enduring spiritual 
life? Here is the period in which the relation of 
master and pupil is or may be most Intimate and 
most fruitful; and can be made to serve the highest 
interests of life. Yet, no great proportion of those 
set apart to teach young people seem to realize and 
use this privilege. 

I am aware that much which I am going to ad- 
vocate will sound fantastic; and that the changes In- 
volved may seem at first sight impossible to ac- 
complish. It Is true that If these changes are to be 
useful, they must be gradual. The policy of the 
"clean sweep" Is one which both history and psychol- 
ogy condemn. But it does seem to me a good thing 
to envisage clearly. If we can, the Ideal towards 
which our changes should lead. A garden city is 
not Utopia. Still, It is an advance upon the Vic- 
torian type of suburb and slum; and we should not 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 243 

have got it if some men had not believed in Utopia, 
and tried to make a beginning here and now. Al- 
ready in education some few have tried to make such 
a beginning and have proved that it is possible if 
we believe in it enough: for faith can move even 
that mountainous thing, the British parental mind. 

Our task — and I believe our most real hope for 
the future — is, as we have already allowed, to make 
the idea of God dominant for the plastic youthful 
consciousness: and not only this, but to harmonize 
that conception, first with our teachings about the 
physical and mental sides of life, and next with the 
child's own social activities, training body, mind and 
spirit together that they may take each their part in 
the development of a whole man, fully responsive 
to a universe which is at bottom a spiritual fact. 
Such training to be complete must, as we have seen, 
begin in the nursery and be given by the atmos- 
phere and opportunities of the home. It will in- 
clude the instilling of childish habits of prayer and 
the fostering of simple expressions of reverence, ad- 
miration and love. The subconscious knowledge 
implicit in such practice must form the foundation, 
and only where it is present will doctrine and prin- 
ciple have any real meaning for the child. Prayer 
must come before theology, and kindness, tender- 
ness and helpfulness before ethics. 

But we have now to consider the child of school 
age, coming — too often without this, the only ade- 



214 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

quate preparation — Into the teacher's hands. How 
is he to be dealt with, and the opportunities which 
he presents used best? 

"When I see a right man," said Jacob Boehme, 
"there I see three worlds standing." Since our aim 
should be to make "right men" and evoke in them 
not merely a departmental piety but a robust and in- 
telligent spirituality, we ought to explain in simple 
ways to these older children something at least of 
that view of human nature on which our training is 
based. The religious instruction given in most 
schools is divided, in varying proportions, between 
historical or doctrinal teaching and ethical teach- 
ing. Now a solid hold both on history and on mor- 
als is a great need; but these are only realized in 
their full Importance and enter completely into life 
when they are seen within the spiritual atmosphere, 
and already even in childhood, and supremely In 
youth, this atmosphere can be evoked. It does not 
seem to occur to most teachers that religion contains 
anything beyond or within the two departments of 
historical creed and of morals: that, for instance, 
the greatest utterances of St. John and St. Paul deal 
with neither, but with attainable levels of human 
life, in which a new and fuller kind of experience 
was offered to mankind. Yet surely they ought at 
least to attempt to tell their pupils about this. I 
da not see how Christians at any rate can escape 
the obligation, or shuffle out of it by saying that 
they do not know how it can be done. Indeed, all 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 245 

who are not thorough-going materialists must re- 
gard the study of the" spiritual life as in the truest 
sense a department of biology; and any account of 
man which fails to describe it, as incomplete. 
Where the science of the body is studied, the science 
of the soul should be studied too. Therefore, in 
the upper forms at least, the psychology of religious 
experience in its widest sense, as a normal part of 
all full human existence, and the connection of that 
experience with practical life, as it is seen in history, 
should be taught. If it is done properly it will 
hold the pupil's interest, for it can be made to ap- 
peal to those same mental qualities of wonder, 
curiosity and exploration which draw so many boys 
and girls to physical science. But there should be 
no encouragement of introspection, none of the false 
mystery or so-called reverence with which these 
subjects are sometimes surrounded, and above all 
no spirit of exclusivism. 

The pupil should be led to see his own religion as 
a part of the universal tendency of life to God. 
This need not involve any reduction of the claims 
made on him by his own church or creed; but the em- 
phasis should always be on the likeness rather than 
the differences of the great religions of the world. 
Moreover, higher education cannot be regarded as 
complete unless the mind be furnished with some 
rationale of its own deepest experiences, and a har- 
mony be established between impulse and thought. 
Advanced pupils should, then, be given a simple and 



246 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

general philosophy of religion, plainly stated in 
language which relates it with the current philoso- 
phy of life. This is no counsel of perfection. It 
has been done, and can be done again. It is said 
of Edward Caird, that he placed his pupils "from 
the beginning at a point of view whence the life of 
mankind could be contemplated as one movement, 
single though infinitely varied, unerring though 
wandering, significant yet mysterious, secure and 
self-enriching although tragical. There was a gen- 
eral sense of the spiritual nature of reality and of 
the rule of mind, though what was meant by 
spirit or mind was hardly asked. There was a hope 
and faith that outstripped all save the vaguest under- 
standing but which evoked a glad response that some- 
how God was immanent in the world and in the his- 
tory of all mankind, making it sane." And the 
effect of this teaching on the students was that "they 
received the doctrine with enthusiasm, and forgot 
themselves in the sense of their partnership in a 
universal enterprise." ^ Such teaching as this is a 
real preparation for citizenship, an introduction to 
the enduring values of the world. 

Every human being, as we know, inevitably tends 
to emphasize some aspects of that world, and to 
ignore others: to build up for himself a relative uni- 
verse. The choices which determine the universe 
of maturity are often made in youth; then the foun- 

1 Jones and Muirhead : "Life and Philosophy of Edward Caird," 
pp. 64, 65. 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 247 

dations are laid of that apperceiving mass which 
is to condition all the man's contacts with reality. 
We ought, therefore, to show the universe to our 
young people from such an angle and in such a 
light, that they tend quite simply and without any 
objectionable intensity to select, emphasize and be 
interested in its spiritual aspect. For this purpose 
we must never try to force our own reading of that 
universe upon them; but respect on the one hand 
their often extreme sensitiveness and on the other 
the infinitely various angles of approach proper to 
our infinitely various souls. We should place food 
before them and leave them to browse. Only those 
who have tried this experiment know what such an 
enlargement of the horizon and enrichment of 
knowledge means to the eager, adolescent mind: 
how prompt is the response to any appeal which we 
make to its nascent sense of mystery. Yet whole 
schools of thought on these subjects are cheerfully 
ignored by the majority of our educationists; hence 
the unintelligent and indeed babyish view of religion 
which is harboured by many adults, even of the in- 
tellectual class. 

Though the spiritual life has its roots in the heart 
not in the head, and will never be brought about by 
merely academic knowledge; yet, its beginnings in 
adolescence are often lost, because young people are 
completely ignorant of the meaning of their own ex- 
periences, and the universal character of those needs 
and responses which they dimly feel stirring within 



248 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

them. They are too shy to ask, and no one ever 
tells them about it in a business-like and unembar- 
rassing way. This infant mortality in the spiritual 
realm ought not to be possible. Experience of 
God is the greatest (A the rights of man, and should 
not be left to become the casual discovery of the 
few. Therefore prayer ought to be regarded as a 
universal human activity, and its nature and diffi- 
culties should be taught, but always in the sense of 
intercourse rather than of mere petition: keeping 
in mind the doctrine of the mystics that "prayer in 
itself properly is not else but a devout intent di- 
rected unto God." ^ We teach concentration for 
the purposes of study; but too seldom think of ap- 
plying it to the purposes of prayer. Yet real prayer 
is a difficult art; which, like other ways of approach- 
ing Perfect Beauty, only discloses its secrets to those 
who win them by humble training and hard work. 
Shall we not try to find some method of showing 
our adolescents their way into this world, lying at 
our doors and offered to us without money and with- 
out price? 

Again, many teachers and parents waste the re- 
ligious instinct and emotional vigour which are often 
so marked in adolescence, by allowing them to frit- 
ter themselves upon symbols which cannot stand 
against hostile criticism: for instance, some of the 
more sentimental and anthropomorphic aspects of 
Christian devotion. Did we educate those instincts, 

i"The Cloud of Unknowing," Cap. 39. 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 249 

show the growing creature their meaning, and give 
them an objective which did not conflict with the ob- 
jectives of the developing intellect and the will, we 
should turn their passion into power, and lay the 
foundations of a real spiritual life. We must re- 
member that a good deal of adolescent emotion is 
diverted by the conditions of school-life from its ob- 
vious and natural objective. This is so much en- 
ergy set free for other uses. We know how it 
emerges in hero-worship or in ardent friendships; 
how it reinforces the social instinct and produces the 
team-spirit, the intense devotion to the interests of 
his own gang or group which is rightly prominent 
in the life of many boys. The teacher has to reckon 
with this funded energy and enthusiasm, and use it 
to further the highest interests of the growing child. 
By this I do not mean that he is to encourage an 
abnormal or emotional concentration on spiritual 
things. Most of the impulses of youth are whole- 
some, and subserve direct ends. Therefore, it is 
not by taking away love, self-sacrifice, admiration, 
curiosity, from their natural objects that we shall 
serve the best interests of spirituality: but, by en- 
larging the range over which these impulses work 
— impulses, indeed, which no human object can 
wholly satisfy, save in a sacramental sense. Two 
such natural tendencies, specially prominent in child- 
hood, are peculiarly at the disposal of the religious 
teacher: and should be used by him to the full. It 
is in the sublimation of the instinct of comradeship 



250 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

that the social and corporate side of the spiritual 
life takes its rise, and in closest connection with this 
impulse that all works of charity should be sug- 
gested and performed. And on the Individual side, 
all that is best, safest and sweetest in the religious 
instinct of the child can be related to a similar en- 
largement of the instinct of filial trust and depen- 
dence. The educator is therefore working within 
the two most fundamental childish qualities, quali- 
ties provoked and fostered by all right family life, 
with its relation of love to parents, brothers, sisters 
and friends; and may gently lead out these two 
mighty impulses to a fulfilment which, at maturity, 
embrace God and the whole world. The wise 
teacher, then, must work with the instincts, not 
against them: encouraging all kindly social feel- 
ings, all vigorous self-expression, wonder, trustful- 
ness, love. Recognizing the paramount Importance 
of emotion — for without emotional colour no idea 
can be actual to us, and no deed thoroughly and 
vigorously performed — yet he must always be on 
his guard against blocking the natural channels of 
human feeling, and giving them the opportunity of 
exploding under pious disguises in the religious 
sphere. 

Here it is that the danger of too emotional a type 
of religious training comes in. Sentimentallsm of 
all kinds is dangerous and objectionable, especially 
In the education of girls, whom it excites and de- 
bilitates. Boys are more often merely alienated by 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 251 

it. In both cases, the method of presentation which 
regards the spiritual life simply as a normal aspect 
of full human life is best. No artificial barrier 
should be set up between the sacred and the pro- 
fane. The passion for truth and the passion for 
God should be treated as one: and that pursuit of 
knowledge for its own sake, those adventurous ex- 
plorations of the mind, in which the more intelligent 
tj^e of adolescent loves to try his growing powers, 
ought to be encouraged in the spiritual sphere as 
elsewhere. The results of research into religious 
origins should be explained without reservation, and 
no intellectual difficulty should be dodged. The 
putting-off method of meeting awkward questions, 
now generally recognized as dangerous in matters 
of natural history, is just as dangerous in the re- 
ligious sphere. No teacher who i^ afraid to state 
his own position with perfect candour should ever 
be allowed to undertake this side of education; nor 
any in whom there is a marked cleavage between the 
standard of conduct and the standard of thought. 
The healthy adolescent is prompt to perceive incon- 
sistency and unsparing in its condemnation. 

Moreover, a most careful discrimination is daily 
becoming more necessary, in the teaching of tradi- 
tional religion of a supernatural and non-empirical 
type. Many of its elements must no doubt be re- 
tained by us, for the child-mind demands firm out- 
lines and examples and imagery drawn from the 
world of sense. Yet grave dangers are attached 



252 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

to it. On the one hand an exclusive reliance on tra- 
dition paves the way for the disillusion which is so 
often experienced towards the end of adolescence, 
when it frequently causes a violent reaction to ma- 
terialism. On the other hand it exposes us to a 
risk which we particularly want to avoid: that of 
reducing the child's nascent spiritual life to the 
dream level, to a fantasy in which it satisfies wishes 
that outward life leaves unfulfilled. Many pious 
people, especially those who tell us that their re- 
ligion is a "comfort" to them, go through life in a 
spiritual day-dream of this kind. Concrete life has 
starved them of love, of beauty, of interest — It has 
given them no synthesis which satisfies the passion- 
ate human search for meaning — and they have 
found all this In a dream-world, made from the 
materials of conventional piety. If religion Is thus 
allowed to become a ready-made day-dream it will 
certainly interest adolescents of a certain sort. The 
naturally Introverted type will become meditative; 
whilst their opposltes, the extroverted or active 
type, will probably tend to be ritualistic. But here 
again we are missing the essence of spiritual life. 

Our aim should be to Induce, in a wholesome way, 
that sense of the spiritual in daily experience which 
the old writers called the consciousness of the 
presence of God. The monastic training in spirit- 
uality, slowly evolved under pressure of experience, 
nearly always did this. It has bequeathed to us a 
funded wisdom of which we make little use: and 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 253 

this, reinterpreted In the light of psychological 
knowledge, might I believe cast a great deal of 
light on the fundamental problems of spiritual ed- 
ucation. We could If we chose take many hints 
from it, as regards the disciplining of the attention, 
the correct use of suggestion, the teaching of medita- 
tion, the sublimation and direction to an assigned 
end of the natural impulse to reverie ; above all, the 
education of the moral life. For character-building 
as understood by these old specialists was the most 
practical of arts. 

Further, In all this teaching, those Inward ac- 
tivities and responses to which we can give generally 
the name of prayer, and those outward activities 
and deeds of service to which we can give the name 
of work, ought to be trained together and never 
dissociated. They are the complementary and bal- 
anced expressions of one spirit of life : and must be 
given together, under appropriately simple forms. 
Concrete application of the child's energies, apti- 
tudes and ideals must from the first run side by 
side with the teaching of principle. Young people 
therefore should constantly be encouraged to face 
as practical and Interesting facts, not as formulae, 
those reactions to eternal and this-world reality 
which used to be called our duty to God and our 
neighbour; and do concrete things proper to a real 
citizen of a really theocratic world. They must be 
made to realize that nothing Is truly ours until we 
have expressed It In our deeds. Moreover, these 



254 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

deeds should not be easy. They should involve ef- 
fort and self-sacrifice; and also some drudgery, 
which is worse. The spiritual life is only valued 
by those on whom it makes genuine demands. Al- 
most any kind of service will do, which calls for 
attention, time and hard work. Though voluntary, 
it must not be casual: but, once undertaken, should 
be regarded as an honourable obligation. The Boy 
Scouts and Girl Guides have shown us how wide a 
choice of possible "good deeds" is offered by every 
community: and such a banding together of young 
people for corporate acts of service is strongly to 
be commended. It encourages unselfish comrade- 
ship, satisfies that "gang-instinct" which is a well- 
known character of adolescence, and should leave 
no opening for self-consciousness, rivalry, and van- 
ity in well-doing or in abnegation. 

Wise educators find that a combined system of 
organized games in which the social instinct can 
be expressed and developed, and of independent con- 
structive work, in which the creative impulse can 
find satisfaction, best meets the corporate and crea- 
tive needs of adolescence, favours the right develop- 
ment of character, and produces a harmonized life. 
On the level of the spiritual life too this principle 
is valid; and, guided by it, we should seek to give 
young people both corporate and personal work and 
experience. On the one hand, gregariousness is at 
its strongest in the healthy adolescent, the force of 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 255 

public opinion Is more Intensely felt than at any other 
time of life, that priceless quality the spirit of com- 
radeship Is most easily educed. We must there- 
fore seek to give the spiritual life a vigorous cor- 
porate character; to make It *'good form" for the 
school, and to use the team-spirit In the choir and 
the guild as well as in the cricket field. By an ex- 
tension of this principle and under the influence of a 
suitable teacher, the school-mob may be transformed 
into a co-operative society animated by one joyous 
and unselfish spirit: all the great powers of social 
suggestion being freely used for the highest ends. 
Thus we may introduce the pupil, at his most plastic 
age. Into a spiritual-social order and let him grow 
within It, developing those qualities and skills on 
which it makes demands. The religious exercises, 
whatever they are, should be in common. In order to 
develop the mass consciousness of the school and 
weld It Into a real group. Music, songs, pro- 
cessions, etc., produce a feeling of unity, and en- 
courage spiritual contagion. Services of an appro- 
priate kind, If there be a chapel, or the opening of 
school with prayer and a hymn (which ought always 
to be followed by a short silence) provide a natural 
expression for corporate religious feeling: and re- 
member that to give a feeling opportunity of volun- 
tary expression is commonly to educe and affirm 
it. As regards active work, whilst school charities 
are an obvious field in which unselfish energies may 



256 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

be spent, many other openings will be found by en- 
thusiastic teachers, and by the pupils whom their 
enthusiasm has inspired. 

On the other hand, the spare-time occupations 
of the adolescent; the independent and self-chosen 
work, often most arduous and always absorbing, of 
making, planning, learning about things — and most 
of us can still remember how desperately important 
these seemed to us, whether our taste was for 
making engines, writing poetry, or collecting moths 
— these are of the greatest importance for his de- 
velopment. TTiey give him something really his 
own, exercise his powers, train his attention, feed 
his creative instinct. They counteract those me- 
chanical and conventional reactions to the world, 
which are induced by the merely traditional type of 
education, either of manners or of mind. And 
here, in the prudent encouragement of a personal 
interest in and dealing with the actual problems of 
conduct and even of belief — the most difficult of the 
educator's tasks — we guard against the merely ac- 
quiescent attitude of much adult piety, and foster 
from the beginning a vigorous personal interest, a 
first-hand contact with higher realities. 

The heroic aspect of history may well form the 
second line in this attempt to capture education and 
use it in the interests of the spiritual life. By it we 
can best link up the actual and the ideal, and demon- 
strate the single character of human greatness; 
whether it be exhibited in the physical or the super- 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 257 

sensual sphere. Such a demonstration Is most im- 
portant; for so long as the spiritual life is regarded 
as merely a departmental thing, and its full develop- 
ment as a matter for specialists or saints, It will 
never produce its full effect In human affairs. We 
must exhibit it as the full flower of that Reality 
which inspires all human life. ^'All kinds of skill, '* 
said Tauler, "are gifts of the Holy Ghost," and he 
might have said, all kinds of beauty and all kinds of 
courage too. 

The heroic makes a direct appeal to lads and 
girls, and Is by far the safest way of approach to 
their emotions. The chivalrous, the noble, the des- 
perately brave, attract the adolescent far more 
than passive goodness. That strong Instinct of 
subjection, of homage, which he shows In his hero- 
worship, Is a most valuable tool in the hands of the 
teacher who Is seeking to lead him Into greater full- 
ness of life. Yet the range over which we seek 
material for his admiration Is often deplorably nar- 
row. We have behind us a great spiritual history, 
which shows the highest faculties of the soul In 
action : the power and the happiness they bring. Do 
we take enough notice of It? What about our 
English saints? I mean the real saints, not the 
official ones. Not St. George and St. Alban, about 
whom we know practically nothing: but, for Instance, 
Lancelot Andrewes, John Wesley, Elizabeth Fry, 
about whom we know a great deal. Children, who 
find difficulty in general ideas, learn best from par- 



258 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

ticular Instances. Yet boys and girls who can give 
a coherent account of such stimulating personalities 
as Julius Caesar, William the Conqueror, Henry 
VIII. and his wives, or Napoleon — none of whom 
have so very much to tell us that bears on the per- 
manent interests of the soul — do not as a rule pos- 
sess any vivid idea, say, of Gautama, St. Benedict, 
Gregory the Great, St. Catherine of Siena, St. Fran- 
cis Xavier, George Fox, St. Vincent de Paul and his 
friends: persons at least as significant, and far bet- 
ter worth meeting, than the military commanders 
and political adventurers of their time. The 
stories of the early Buddhists, the Sufi saints, St. 
Francis of Asslsl, St. Ignatius, the early Quakers, 
the African missionaries, are full of things which 
can be made to interest even a young child. The 
legends which have grown up round some of them 
satisfy the Instinct that draws It to fairy tales. 
They help it to dream well; and give to the de- 
veloping mind food which It could assimilate in no 
other way. Older boys and girls, could they be 
given some idea of the spiritual heroes of Christen- 
dom as real men and women, without the nauseous 
note of piety which generally Infects their biogra- 
phies, would find much to delight them: romance of 
the best sort, because concerned with the highest 
values, and stories of endurance and courage such 
as always appeal to them. These people were not 
objectionable pietists. They were persons of full- 
est vitality and immense natural attraction; the pick 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 259 

of the race. We know that, by the numbers who 
left all to follow them. Ought we not to intro- 
duce our pupils to them; not as stuffed specimens, 
but as vivid human beings? Something might be 
done to create the right atmosphere for this, on the 
lines suggested by Dr. Hayward in that splendid 
little book "The Lesson in Appreciation.'* All that 
he says there about aesthetics, is applicable to any 
lesson dealing with the higher values of life. In 
this way, young people would be made to realize the 
spiritual life; not as something abnormal and more 
or less conventionalized, but as a golden thread run- 
ning right through human history, and making de- 
mands on just those dynamic qualities which they 
feel themselves to possess. The adolescent is natur- 
ally vigorous and combative, and wants, above all 
else, something worth fighting for. This, too often, 
his teachers forget to provide. 

The study of nature, and of aesthetics — including 
poetry — gives us yet another way of approach. 
The child should be introduced to these great worlds 
of life and of beauty, and encouraged but never 
forced to feed on the best they contain. By im- 
plication, but never by any method savouring of 
"uplift," these subjects should be related with that 
sense of the spiritual and of its immanence in crea- 
tion, which ought to inspire the teacher; and with 
which it is his duty to infect his pupils if he can. 
Children may, very early, be taught or rather in- 
duced to look at natural things with that quietness, 



260 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

attention, and delight which are the beginnings of 
contemplation, and the conditions under which na- 
ture reveals her real secrets to us. The child is a 
natural pagan, and often the first appeal to Its 
nascent spiritual faculty is best maHe through Its 
instinctive joy In the life of animals and flowers, 
the clouds and the winds. Here It may learn very 
easily that wonder and adoration, which are the 
gateways to the presence of God. In simple forms 
of verse, music, and rhythmical movement it can be 
encouraged — as the Salvation Army has discovered 
— to give this happy adoration a natural, dramatic, 
and rhythmic expression: for the young child, as 
we know, reproduces the mental condition of the 
primitive, and primitive forms of worship will suit 
It best. 

It need hardly be said that education of the type 
we have been considering demands great gifts In 
the teacher: simplicity, enthusiasm, sympathy, and 
also a vigorous sense of humour, keeping him 
sharply aware of the narrow line that divides the 
priggish from the Ideal. This education ought to 
inspire, but It ought not to replace, the fullest and 
most expert training of the body and mind; for the 
spirit needs a perfectly balanced machine, through 
which to express Its life In the physical world. The 
actual additions to curriculum which It demands 
may be few: It Is the attitude, the spirit, which must 
be changed. Specifically moral education, the 
building of character, will of course form an es- 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 261 

sentlal part of It: in fact must be present within it 
from the first. But this comes best without obser- 
vation, and will be found to depend chiefly on the 
character of the teacher, the love, admiration and 
imitation he evokes, the ethical tone he gives. 
Childhood Is of all ages the one most open to sug- 
gestion, and In this fact the educator finds at once his 
best opportunity and greatest responsibility. 

Ruysbroeck has described to us the three outstand- 
ing moral dispositions In respect of God, of man, 
and of the conduct of life, which mark the true man 
or woman of the Spirit ; and it is in the childhood that 
the tendency to these qualities must be acquired. 
First, he says, — I paraphrase, since the old terms of 
moral theology are no longer vivid to us — there 
comes an attitude of reverent love, of adoration, 
towards all that is holy, beautiful, or true. And 
next, from this, there grows up an attitude towards 
other men, governed by those qualities which are 
the essence of courtesy: patience, gentleness, kind- 
ness, and sympathy. These keep us both supple 
and generous In our responses to our social environ- 
ment. Last, our creative energies are transfigured 
by an energetic love, an Inward eagerness for every 
kind of work, which makes impossible all slackness 
and dullness of heart, and will impel us to live to 
the utmost the active life of service for which we 
are born.^ 

But these moral qualities cannot be taught; they 

1 Ruysbroeck: "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk. 
I, Caps. 12-24. 



262 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

are learned by imitation and infection, and devel- 
oped by opportunity of action. The best agent of 
their propagation is an attractive personality in 
which they are dominant; for we know the universal 
tendency of young people to imitate those whom 
they admire. The relation between parent and 
child or master and pupil is therefore the central 
factor in any scheme of education which seeks to 
further the spiritual life. Only those who have 
already become real can communicate the knowledge 
of Reality. It is from the sportsman that we catch 
the spirit of fair-play, from the humble that we 
learn humility. The artist shows us beauty, the 
saint shows us God. It should therefore be the 
business of those in authority to search out and give 
scope to those who possess and are able to impart 
this triumphing spiritual life. A head-master who 
makes his boys live at their highest level and act on 
their noblest impulses, because he does it himself, 
is a person of supreme value to the State. It would 
be well if we cleared our minds of cant, and acknowl- 
edged that such a man alone is truly able to edu- 
cate; since the spiritual life is infectious, but cannot 
be propagated by artificial means. 

Finally, we have to remember that any attempt 
towards the education of the spirit — and such an 
attempt must surely be made by all who accept 
spiritual values as central for life — can only safely 
be undertaken with full knowledge of its special 
dangers and difficulties. These dangers and diffi- 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 263 

cultles are connected with the instinctive and intellec- 
tual life of the child and the adolescent, who are 
growing, and growing unevenly, during the whole 
period of training. They are supple as regards 
other forces than those which we bring to bear on 
them; open to suggestion from many different 
levels of life. 

Our greatest difficulty abides in the fact that, as 
we have seen, a vigorous spiritual life must give 
scope to the emotions. It is above all the heart 
rather than the mind which must be won for God. 
Yet, the greatest care must be exercised to ensure 
that the appeal to the emotions is free from all pos- 
sibility of appeal to latent and uncomprehended 
natural instincts. This peril, to which current 
psychology gives perhaps too much attention, is 
nevertheless real. Candid students of religious 
history are bound to acknowledge the unfortunate 
part which it has often played in the past. These 
natural instincts fall into two great classes : those 
relating to self-preservation and those relating to 
the preservation of the race. The note of fear, the 
exaggerated longing for shelter and protection, the 
childish attitude of mere clinging dependence, 
fostered by religion of a certain type, are all oblique 
expressions of the instinct of self-preservation: and 
the rather feverish devotional moods and exuberant 
emotional expressions with which we are all familiar 
have, equally, a natural origin. Our task in the 
training of young people is to evoke enthusiasm, 



264 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

courage and love, without appealing to either of 
these sources of excitement. Generally speaking, it 
is safe to say that for this reason all sentimental 
and many anthropomorphic religious Ideas are bad 
for lads and girls. These have, Indeed, no part in 
that austere yet ardent love of God which Inspires 
the real spiritual life. 

Our aim ought to be, to teach and impress the real- 
ity of Spirit, its regnancy in human life, whilst the 
mind Is alert and supple : and so to teach and Impress 
it, that it Is woven Into the stuff of the mental and 
moral life and cannot seriously be Injured by the hos- 
tile criticisms of the rationalist. Remember, that 
the prime object of education Is the moulding of the 
unconscious and Instinctive nature, the home of habit. 
If we can give this the desired tendency and tone of 
feeling, we can trust the rational mind to find good 
reasons with which to reinforce Its attitudes and 
preferences. So It is not so much the specific belief, 
as the whole spiritual attitude to existence which 
we seek to affirm; and this will be done on the whole 
more effectively by the generalized suggestions 
which come to the pupil from his own surroundings, 
and the lives of those whom he admires, than by the 
limited and special suggestions of a creed. It is 
found that the less any desired motive is bound up 
with particular acts, persons, or Ideas, the 
greater Is the chance of its being universalized an4 
made good for life all round. I do not Intend by 
this statement to criticize any particular presentation 



THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND EDUCATION 265 

of religion. Nevertheless, educators ought to re- 
member that a religion which Is first entirely bound 
up with narrow and childish theological ideas, and 
is then presented as true In the absolute sense, is 
bound to break down under greater knowledge or 
hostile criticism; and may then Involve the disappear- 
ance of the religious impulse as a whole, at least for 
a long period. 

Did we know our business, we ought surely to be 
able to ensure in our young people a steady and har- 
monious spiritual growth. The "conversion" or 
psychic convulsion* which is sometimes regarded as 
an essential preliminary of any vivid awakening of 
the spiritual consciousness, is really a tribute exacted 
by our wrong educational methods. It is a proof 
that we have allowed the plastic creature confided to 
us to harden in the wrong shape. But if, side by side 
and in simplest language, we teach the conceptions: 
first, of God as the transcendent yet Indwelling Spirit 
of love, of beauty and of power; next, of man's con- 
stant dependence on Him and possible contact with 
His nature in that arduous and loving act of atten- 
tion which Is the essence of prayer; last, of unselfish 
work and fellowship as the necessary expressions of 
all human Ideals — then, I think, we may hope to 
lay the foundations of a balanced and a wholesome 
life, in which man's various faculties work together 
for good, and his vigorous instinctive life Is directed 
to the highest ends. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND THE SOCIAL 
ORDER 

We have come to the last chapter of this book; 
and I am conscious that those who have had the 
patience to follow its argument from the beginning, 
may now feel a certain sense of incompleteness. 
They v\ill observe that, though many things have 
been said about the life of the Spirit, not a great 
deal seems to have been said, at any rate directly, 
about the second half of the title — the life of to-day 
— and especially about those very important aspects 
of our modern active life which are resumed in the 
word Social. This avoidance has been, at least in 
part, intentional. We have witnessed in this century 
a violent revulsion from the individualistic type 
of religion; a revulsion which parallels upon its own 
levels, and indeed is a part of, the revolt from Vic- 
torian individualism in political and economic life. 
Those who come much into contact with students, 
and with the younger and more vigorous clergy, are 
aware how far this revolt has proceeded: how com- 
pletely. In the minds of those young people who are 
interested in religion, the Social Gospel now over- 
powers all other aspects of the spiritual life. Again 

266 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 267 

and again we are assured by the most earnest among 
them that in their view religion Is a social activity, 
and service is Its proper expression: that all valid 
knowledge of God is social, and He is chiefly known 
In mankind : that the use of prayer Is mainly social, 
in that it improves us for service, otherwise It must 
be condemned as a merely selfish activity: finally, 
that the true meaning and value of suffering are so- 
cial too. A visitor to a recent Swanwick Conference 
of the Student Christian Movement has publicly 
expressed his regret that some students still seemed 
to be concerned with the problems of thir own spir- 
itual life; and were not prepared to let that look 
after itself, whilst they started straight off to work 
for the social realization of the Kingdom of God. 
When a great truth becomes exaggerated to this 
extent, and is held to the exclusion of Its compen- 
sating opposite. It Is In a fair way to becoming a He. 
And we have here, I think, a real confusion of ideas 
which will, If allowed to continue, react unfavourably 
upon the religion of the future; because It gives 
away the most sacred conviction of the idealist, the 
belief In the absolute character of spiritual values, 
and in the effort to win them as the great activity 
of man. Social service, since it is one form of such 
an effort, a bringing in of more order, beauty, joy. 
Is a fundamental duty — the fundamental duty — of 
the active life. Man does not truly love the Perfect 
until he Is driven thus to seek Its Incarnation in the 
world of time. No one doubts this. All spiritual 



268 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

teachers have said It, In one way or another, for 
centuries. The mere fact that they feel impelled to 
teach at all, instead of saying "My secret to myself" 
— which Is so much easier and pleasanter to the 
natural contemplative — Is a guarantee of the claim 
to service which they feel that love lays upon them. 
But this does not make such service of man, however 
devoted, either the same thing as the search for, 
response to, Intercourse with God; or, a sufficient 
substitute for these specifically spiritual acts. 

Plainly, we are called upon to strive with all our 
power to bring In the Kingdom; that is, to Incarnate 
In the time world the highest spiritual values which 
we have known. But our ability to do this Is strictly 
dependent on those values being known, at least by 
some of us, at first-hand; and for this first-hand per- 
ception, as we have seen, the soul must have a mea- 
sure of solitude and silence. Therefore, if the 
swing-over to a purely social interpretation of reli- 
gion be allowed to continue unchecked, the result 
can only be an Impoverishment of our spiritual life; 
quite as far-reaching and as regrettable as that which 
follows from an unbridled individualism. Without 
the Inner life of prayer and meditation, lived for 
Its own sake and for no utilitarian motive, neither 
our judgments upon the social order nor our active 
social service will be perfectly performed; because 
they will not be the channel of Creative Spirit ex- 
pressing itself through us in the world of to-day. 

Christ, it Is true, gives nobody any encouragement 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 269 

for supposing that a merely self-cultivating sort of 
spirituality, keeping the home fires burning and so 
on, is anybody's main job. The main job confided 
to His friends is the preaching of the Gospel. That 
is, spreading Reality, teaching it, inserting it into 
existence; by prayers, words, acts, and also if need 
be by manual work, and always under the conditions 
and symbolisms of our contemporary world. But 
since we can only give others that which we already 
possess, this presupposes that we have got some- 
thing of Reality as a living, burning fire in ourselves. 
The soul's two activities of reception and donation 
must be held in balance, or impotence and unreality 
will result. It is only out of the heart of his own 
experience that man really helps his neighbour : and 
thus there is an ultimate social value in the most 
secret responses of the soul to grace. No one, for 
instance, can help others to repentance who has not 
known it at first-hand. Therefore we have to keep 
the home fires burning, because they are the fires 
which raise the steam that does the work: and we 
do this mostly by the fuel with which we feed them, 
though partly too by giving free access to currents 
of fresh air from the outer world. 

We cannot read St. Paul's letters with sympathy 
and escape the conviction that in the midst of his 
great missionary efforts he was profoundly con- 
cerned too with the problems of his own inner life. 
The little bits of self-revelation that break into the 
epistles and, threaded together, show us the curve 



270 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

of his growth, also show us how much lay behind 
them, how intense and how exacting was the Inward 
travail that accompanied his outward deeds. Here 
he Is representative of the true apostolic type. It 
Is because St. Augustine Is the man of the "Con- 
fessions'' that he Is also the creator of "The City 
of God." The regenerative work of St. Francis was 
accompanied by an unremitting life of penitence and 
recollection. Fox and Wesley, abounding In la- 
bours, yet never relaxed the tension of their soul's 
effort to correspond with a transcendent Reality. 
These and many other examples warn us that only 
by such a sustained and double movement can the 
man of the Spirit actualize all his possibilities and 
do his real work. Fie must, says Ruysbroeck, "both 
ascend and descend with love." ^ On any other 
basis he misses the richness of that fully integrated 
human existence "swinging between the unseen and 
the seen" in which the social and Individual, incor- 
porated and solitary responses to the demands oT 
Spirit are fully carried through. Instead, he ex- 
hibits restriction and lack of balance. This in the 
end must react as unfavourably on the social as on 
the personal side of life: since the place and In- 
fluence of the spiritual life In the social order will 
depend entirely on Its place In the individual con- 
sciousness of which that social order will be built, 
the extent in which loyalty to the one Spirit governs 
their reactions to common daily experience. 

1 "The Mirror of Eternal Salvation," Cap. 7. 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 271 

Here then, as In so much else, the ideal is not an 
arbitrary choice but a struck balance. First, a per- 
sonal contact with Eternal Reality, deepening, Il- 
luminating and enlarging all of our experience of 
fact, all our responses to It: that is, faith. Next, 
the fullest possible sense of our membership of and 
duty towards the social organism, a completely rich, 
various, heroic, self-giving, social life : that Is, char- 
ity. The dissociation of these two sides of human 
experience Is fatal to that divine hope which should 
crown and unite them; and which represents the 
human Instinct for novelty in a sublimated form. 

It Is of course true that social groups may be re- 
generated. The success of such group-formations 
as the primitive Franciscans, the Friends of God, 
the Quakers, the Salvation Army, demonstrates this. 
But groups, in the last resort, consist of Individuals, 
who must each be regenerated one by one; whose 
outlook, if they are to be whole men, must Include 
In Its span abiding values as well as the stream of 
time, and who, for the full development of this 
their two-fold destiny, require each a measure both 
of solitude and of association. Hence It follows, 
that the final answer to the repeated question: 
"Does God save men, does Spirit work towards the 
regeneration of humanity (the same thing), one by 
one, or in groups?" is this: that the proposed alter- 
native is illusory. We cannot say that the Divine 
action in the world as we know It, is either merely 
social or merely Individual; but both. And the 



272 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

next question — a highly practical question — Is, 
"How both?'' For the answer to this, if we can 
find it, will give us at last a formula by which we can 
true up our own effort toward completeness of 
self-expression In the here-and-now. 

How, then, are groups of men moved up to 
higher spiritual levels; helped to such an actual pos- 
session of power and love and a sound mind as shall 
transfigure and perfect their lives? For this, more 
than all else, is what we now want to achieve. I 
speak in generalities, and of average human nature, 
not of these specially sensitive or gifted individuals 
who are themselves the revealers of Reality to their 
fellow-men. 

History suggests, I think, that this group-regen- 
eration is effected in the last resort through a special 
sublimation of the herd-instinct; that is, the full and 
willing use on spiritual levels of the characters 
which are inherent in human gregariousness.^ We 
have looked at some of these characters In past 
chapters. Our study of them suggests that the first 
stage In any social regeneration Is likely to be 
brought about by the instinctive rallying of individ- 
uals about a natural leader, strong enough to com- 
pel and direct them; and whose appeal is to the Im- 
pulsive life, to an acknowledged or unacknowledged 
lack or craving, not to the faculty of deliberate 
choice. This leader, then, must offer new life and 

1 A good general discussion in Tansley: "The New Psychology 
and its Relation to Life," Caps. 19, 20. 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 273 

love, not intellectual solutions. He must be able 
to share with his flock his own ardour and appre- 
hension of Reality; and evoke from them the pro- 
found human impulse to imitation. They will 
catch his enthusiasm, and thus receive the sugges- 
tions of his teaching and of his life. This first 
stage, supremely illustrated in the disciples of 
Christ, and again in the groups who gathered round 
such men as St. Francis, Fox, or Booth, Is re-expe- 
rienced In a lesser way in every successful revival: 
and each genuine restoration of the life of Spirit, 
whether its declared aim be social or religious, has 
a certain revlvallstic character. We must there- 
fore keep an eye on these principles of disclpleship 
and contagion, as likely to govern any future splr- 
ituallzatlon of our own social life; looking for the 
beginnings of true reconstruction, not to the general 
dissemination of suitable doctrines, but to the Hvlng 
burning Influence of an ardent soul. And I may 
add here, as the corollary of this conclusion, first 
that the evoking and fostering of such ardour Is In 
Itself a piece of social service of the highest value, 
and next that it makes every individual socially re- 
sponsible for the due sharing of even the small 
measure of ardour, certitude or power he or she 
has received. We are to be conductors of the 
Divine energy; not to Insulate it. There is of 
course nothing new In all this : but there Is nothing 
new fundamentally in the spiritual life, save in St. 
Augustine's sense of the eternal youth and fresh- 



274 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

ness of all beauty.^ The only novelty which we 
can safely Introduce will be in the terms in which we 
describe It; the perpetual new exhibition of it within 
the time-world, the fresh and various applica- 
tions which we can give to Its abiding laws, in the 
special circumstances and opportunities of our own 
day. 

But the Influence of the crowd-compeller, the 
leader, whether In the crude form of the revivalist 
or In the more penetrating and enduring form of 
the creative mystic or religious founder, the loyalty 
and Imitation of the disciple, the corporate and gen- 
eralized enthusiasm of the group can only be the 
first educative phase In any veritable incarnation of 
Spirit upon earth. Each member of the herd is 
now committed to the fullest personal living-out of 
the new life he has received. Only in so far as the 
first stage of suggestion and Imitation Is carried 
over to the next stage of personal actualization, 
can we say that there is any real promotion of spir- 
itual life: any hope that this life will work a true 
renovation of the group into which it has been in- 
serted and achieve the social phase. 

If, then, it does achieve the social phase what 
stages may we expect it to pass through, and by 
what special characters will It be graced? 

Let us look back for a moment at some of our 
conclusions about the individual life. We said that 
this life, if fully lived, exhibited the four characters 

lAug. Conf., Ek. X, Cap. 27. 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 275 

of work and contemplation, self-discipline and serv- 
ice: deepening and incarnating within its own vari- 
ous this-world experience its other-world apprehen- 
sions of Eternity, of God. Its temper should thus 
be both social and ascetic. It should be doubly 
based, on humility and on given power. Now the 
social order — more exactly, the social organism — 
in which Spirit is really to triumph, can only be 
built up of individuals who do with a greater or less 
perfection and intensity exhibit these char'acters, 
some upon independent levels of creative freedom, 
some on those of discipleship : for here all men are 
not equal, and It is humbug to pretend that they are. 
This social order, being so built of regenerate units, 
would be dominated by these same implicits of the 
regenerate consciousness; and would tend to solve 
in their light the special problems of community 
life. And this unity of aim would really make of 
it one body; the body of a fully socialized and fully 
spiritualized humanity, which perhaps we might 
without presumption describe as indeed the son 
of God. 

The life of such a social organism, Its growth, its 
cycle of corporate behaviour, would be strung on 
that same fourfold cord which combined the desires 
and ^eeds of the regenerate self Into a series: 
namely. Penitence, Surrender, Recollection, and 
Work. It would be actuated first by a real social 
repentance. That is, by a turning from that con- 
stant capitulation to its past, to animal and savage 



276 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

impulse, the power of which our generation at least 
knows only too well; and by the complementary ef- 
fort to unify vigorous instinctive action and social 
conscience. I think every one can find for them- 
selves some sphere, national, racial, industrial, 
financial, in which social penitence could work; and 
the constant corporate fall-back into sin, which we 
now disguise as human nature, or sometimes — even 
more insincerely — as economic and political neces- 
sity, might be faced and called by its true name. 
Such a social penitence — such a corporate realiza- 
tion of the mess that we have made of things — is 
as much a direct movement of the Spirit, and as 
great an essential of regeneration, as any individual 
movement of the broken and contrite heart. 

Could a quick social conscience, aware of obli- 
gations to Reality which do not end with making this 
world a comfortable place — though we have not 
even managed that for the majority of men — feel 
quite at ease, say, after an unflinching survey of our 
present system of State punishment? Or after 
reading the unvarnished record of our dealings with 
the problem of Indian immigration into Africa? 
Or after considering the inner nature of interna- 
tional diplomacy and finance? Or even, to come 
nearer home, after a stroll through Hoxton: the 
sort of place, it is true, which we have not exactly 
made on purpose but which has made itself be- 
cause we have not, as a community, exercised our 
undoubted powers of choice and action in an in- 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 277 

telllgent and loving way. Can we justify the 
peculiar characteristics of Hoxton: congratulate 
ourselves on the amount of light, air and beauty 
which Its inhabitants enjoy, the sort of children that 
are reared in it, as the best we can do towards fur- 
thering the racial aim? It is a monument of stupid- 
ity no less than of meanness. Yet the conception 
of God which the whole religious experience of 
growing man presses on us, suggests that both In- 
telligence and love ought to characterize His Ideal 
for human life. Look then at these, and all the 
other things of the same kind. Look at our at- 
titude towards prostitution, at the drink traffic, at 
the ugliness and injustice of the many institutions 
which we allow to endure. Look at them In the 
Universal Spirit; and then consider, whether a 
searching corporate repentance is not really the in- 
evitable preliminary of a social and spiritual ad- 
vance. All these things have happened because we 
have as a body consistently fallen below our best 
possible, lacked courage to Incarnate our vision in 
the political sphere. Instead, we have, acted on 
the crowd level, swayed by unsublimated Instincts of 
acquisition, disguised lust, self-preservation, self- 
assertion, and ignoble fear: and such a fall-back Is 
the very essence of social sin. 

We have made many plans and elevations; but 
we have not really tried to build Jerusalem either 
in our own hearts or In "England's pleasant land." 
Blake thought that the preliminary of such a build- 



278 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Ing up of the harmonious social order must be the 
building up or harmonizing of men, of each man; 
and when this essential work was really done, 
Heaven's "Countenance Divine" would suddenly de- 
clare Itself "among the dark Satanic mills." ^ What 
was wrong with man, and ultimately therefore with 
society, was the cleavage between his "Spectre" or 
energetic intelligence, and "Emanation^ or loving 
Imagination. Divided, they only tormented one 
another. United, they were the material of divine 
humanity. Now the complementary affirmative 
movement which shall balance and complete true 
social penitence will be just such a unification and 
dedication of society's best energies and noblest 
Ideals, now commonly separated. The Spectre Is 
attending to economics: the Emanation is dreaming 
of Utopia. We want to see them united, for from 
this union alone will come the social aspect for sur- 
render. That Is to say, a single-minded, unselfish 
yielding to those good social impulses which we all 
feel from time to time, and might take more se- 
riously did we realize them as the impulsions of holy 
and creative Spirit pressing us towards novelty, 
giving us our chance; our small actualization of the 
universal tendency to the Divine. As It Is, we do 
feel a little uncomfortable when these stirrings 
reach us; but commonly console ourselves with the 
thought that their realization Is at present outside 
the sphere of practical politics. Yet the obliga- 

1 Blake: "Jerusalem." 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 279 

tion of response to those stirrings is laid on all who 
feel them; and unless some will first make this 
venture of faith, our possible future will never be 
achieved. Christ was born among those who ex- 
pected the Kingdom of God. The favouring atmos- 
phere of His childhood is suggested by these words. 
It is our business to prepare, so far as we may, a 
favourable atmosphere and environment for the 
children who will make the future : and this environ- 
ment is not anything mysterious, it is simply our- 
selves. The men and women who are now coming 
to maturity, still supple to experience and capable 
of enthusiastic and disinterested choice— that is, of 
surrender in the noblest sense — will have great op- 
portunities of influencing those who are younger 
than themselves. The torch is being offered to 
them; and it is of vital importance to the unborn 
future that they should grasp and hand it on, with- 
out worrying about whether their fingers are going 
to be burnt. If they do grasp it, they may prove 
to be the bringers in of a new world, a fresh and 
vigorous social order, which is based upon true 
values, controlled by a spiritual conception of life; 
a world in which this factor is as freely acknowl- 
edged by all normal persons, as is the movement of 
the earth round the sun. 

I do not speak here of fantastic dreams about 
Utopias, or of the coloured pictures of the apoca- 
lyptic imagination; but of a concrete genuine pos- 
sibility, at which clear-sighted persons have hinted 



280 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

again and again. Consider our racial past. Look 
at the Piltdown skull : reconstruct the person or 
creature whose brain that skull contained, and 
actualize the directions in which his imperious in- 
stincts, his vaguely conscious will and desire, were 
pressing into life. They too were expressions of 
Creative Spirit; and there is perfect continuity be- 
tween his vital impulse and our own. Now, con- 
sider one of the better achievements of civilization; 
say the life of a University, with its devotion to dis- 
interested learning, its conservation of old beauty 
and quest of new truth. Even if we take Its lowest 
common measure, the transfiguration of desire Is 
considerable. Yet in the things of the Spirit we 
must surely acknowledge ourselves still to be prim- 
itive men; and no one can say that it yet appears 
what we shall be. All really depends on the direc- 
tion in which human society decides to push Into 
experience, the surrender which it makes to the im- 
pulsion of the Spirit; how its terkdency to novelty 
is employed, the sort of complex habits which are 
formed by it, as more and more crude social instinct 
is lifted up into conscious intention, and given 
the precision of thought. 

In our regenerate society, then. If we ever get it, 
the balanced moods of Repentance of our racial 
past and Surrender to our spiritual calling, the pull- 
forward of the Spirit of Life even in its most aus- 
tere and difficult demands, will control us; as being 
the socialized extensions of these same attitudes of 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 281 

the Individual soul. And they will press the com- 
munity to those same balanced expressions of its 
instinct for reality, which completed the individual 
life: that Is to say^ to Recollection and Work. In 
the furnishing of a frame for the regular social ex- 
ercise of recollection — the gathering in of the cor- 
porate mind and its direction to eternal values, the 
abiding foundations of existence; the consideration 
of all its problems In silence and peace; the dra- 
matic and sacramental expression of its unity and of 
its dependence on the higher powers of life — in all 
this, the institutional religion of the future will per- 
haps find its true sphere of action, and take Its 
rightful place In the socialized life of the Spirit. 

Finally, the work which Is done by a community 
of which the inner life Is controlled by these three 
factors will be the concrete expression of these 
factors In the time-world; and will perpetuate and 
hand on all that Is noble, stable and reasonable In 
human discovery and tradition, whether In the 
sphere of conduct, of thought, of creation, of man- 
ual labour, or the control of nature, whilst remain- 
ing supple towards the demands and gifts of novelty. 
New value will be given to craftsmanship and a 
sense of dedication — now almost unknown — to 
those who direct it. Consider the effect of this at- 
titude on worker, trader, designer, employer: how 
many questions would then answer themselves, how 
many sore places would be healed. 

It Is not necessary. In order to take sides with 



282 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

this possible new order and work for It, that we 
should commit ourselves to any one party or 
scheme of social reform. Still less Is It necessary 
to suppose such reform the only field In which the 
active and social side of the spiritual life is to be 
lived. Repentance, surrender, recollection and in- 
dustry can do their transfiguring work In art, science, 
craftsmanship, scholarship, and play: making all 
these things more representative of reality, nearer 
our own best possible, and so more vivid and worth 
while. If Tauler was right, and all kinds of skill 
are gifts of the Holy Ghost — a proposition which 
no thorough-going theist can refuse — then will not 
a reference back on the part of the worker to that 
fontal source of power make for humility and per- 
fection In all work? Personally I am not at all 
afraid to recognize a spiritual element in all good 
craftsmanship, In the delighted and diligent crea- 
tion of the fine potter, smith or carpenter, in the 
well-tended garden and beehive, the perfectly ad- 
justed home; for do not all these help the explica- 
tion of the one Spirit of Life In the diversity of His 
gifts? 

The full life of the Spirit must be more rich and 
various in Its expression than any life that we have 
yet known, and find place for every worthy and de- 
lightful activity. It does not in the least mean a 
bloodless goodness; a refusal of fun and everlast- 
ing fuss about uplift. But it does mean looking at 
and judging each problem In a particular light, and 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 283 

acting on that judgment without fear. Were this 
principle established, and society poised on this 
centre, reforms would follow its application almost 
automatically; specific evils would retreat. New 
knowledge of beauty would reveal the ugliness of 
many satisfactions which we now offer to ourselves, 
and new love the defective character of many of our 
social relations. Certain things would therefore 
leave off happening, would go; because the direction 
of desire had changed. I do not wish to particular- 
ize, for this only means blurring the issue by putting 
forward one's own pet reforms. But I cannot help 
pointing out that we shall never get spiritual values 
out of a society harried and tormented by economic 
pressure, or men and women whose whole atten- 
tion is given up to the daily task of keeping alive. 
This is not a political statement: it is a plain fact 
that we must face. Though the courageous fives 
of the poor, their patient endurance of insecurity 
may reveal a nobility that shames us, it still re- 
mains true that these lives do not represent the 
most favourable conditions of the soul. It 
is not poverty that matters; but strain and the pres- 
ence of anxiety and fear, the impossibility of detach- 
ment. Therefore this oppression at least would 
have to be lightened, before the social conscience 
could be at ease. Moreover as society advances 
along this way, every — even the most subtle — kind 
of cruelty and exploitation of self-advantage ob- 
tained to the detriment of other individuals, must 



2i34 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

tend to be eliminated: because here the drag-back of 
the past will be more and more completely con- 
quered, Its Instincts fully sublimated, and no one 
will care to do those things any more. Bringing 
new feelings and more real concepts to our contact 
with our environment, we shall. In accordance with 
the law of apperception, see this environment in a 
diiferent way; and so obtain from It a fresh series 
of experiences. The scale of pain and pleasure 
will be altered. We shall feel a searching respon- 
sibility about the way In which our money is made, 
and about any disadvantages to others which our 
amusements or comforts may Involve. 

Here, perhaps, it Is well to register a protest 
against the curious but prevalent notion that any such 
concentrated effort for the splritualizatlon of society 
must tend to work Itself out in the direction of a 
maudlin humanltarianism, a soft and sentimental 
reading of life. This idea merely advertises once 
more the fact that we still have a very mean and 
imperfect conception of God, and have made the 
mistake of setting up a water-tight bulkhead be- 
tween His revelation in nature and His discovery 
in the life of prayer. It shows a failure to appre- 
ciate the stern, heroic aspect of Reality; the ele- 
ment of austerity In all genuine religion, the distinc- 
tion between love and sentlmentalism, the rightful 
place of risk, effort, even suffering. In all full achieve- 
ment and all joy. If we are surrendered In love to 
the purposes of the Spirit, we are committed to the 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 285 

bringing out of the best possible In life; and this is a 
hard business, involving a quite definite social 
struggle with evil and atavism, in which some one 
is likely to be hurt. But surely that manly spirit 
of adventure which has driven men to the North 
Pole and the desert, and made them battle with 
delight against apparently impossible odds, can 
here find its appropriate sublimation? 

If anyone who has followed these arguments, and 
now desires to bring them from Idea into practice, 
asks: "What next?" the answer simply is — Begin. 
Begin with ourselves; and if possible, do not begin 
in solitude. "The basal principles of all collective 
life," says McDougall, "are sympathetic contagion, 
mass suggestion, imitation" : ^ and again and again 
the history of spiritual experience illustrates this 
law, that Its propagation Is most often by way of 
disclpleship and the corporate life, not by the in- 
tensive culture of purely solitary effort. It is for 
those who believe In the spiritual life to take full 
advantage now of this social suggestibility of man; 
though without any detraction from the prime Im- 
portance of the personal spiritual life. Therefore, 
join up with somebody, find fellowship; whether It 
be in a church or society, or among a few like- 
minded friends. Draw together for mutual sup- 
port, and face those imperatives of prayer and work 
which we have seen to be the condition of the fullest 
living-out of our existence. 'Fix and keep a reason- 

1 "Social Psychology," Cap. i. 



286 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

ably balanced daily rule. Accept leadership where 
you find it — give it, if you feel the impulse and the 
strength. Do not wait for some grand opportunity, 
and whilst you are waiting stiffen in the wrong 
shape. The great opportunity may not be for us, 
but for the generation whose path we now prepare: 
and we do our best towards such preparation, if we 
begin in a small and humble way the incorporation 
of our hopes and desires as for instance Wesley 
and the Oxford Methodists did. They sought 
merely to put their own deeply felt ideas into action, 
quite simply and without fuss; and we know how 
far the resulting impulse spread. The Bab move- 
ment in the East, the Salvation Army at home, show 
us this principle still operative; what a "little flock" 
dominated by a suitable herd-leader and swayed by 
love and adoration can do — and these, like Chris- 
tianity itself, began as small and inconspicuous 
groups. It may be that our hope for the future 
depends on the formation of such groups — hives of 
the Spirit — in which the worker of every grade, the 
thinker, the artist, might each have their place: ob- 
taining from incorporation the herd-advantages of 
mutual protection and unity of aim, and forming 
nuclei to which others could adhere. 

Such a small group — and I am now thinking of 
something quite practical, say to begin with a study- 
circle, or a company of like-minded friends with a 
definite rule of life — may not seem to the outward 
eye very impressive. Regarded as a unit, It will 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 287 

even tend to be Inferior to its best members : but it 
will be superior to the weakest, and with Its leader 
will possess a dynamic character and reproductive 
power which he could never have exhibited alone. 
It should form a compact organization, both fer- 
vent and business-like; and might take as its ideal a 
combination of the characteristic temper of the con- 
templative order, with that of active and intelligent 
Christianity as seen in the best type of social settle- 
ment. This double character of inwardness and 
practicality seems to me to be essential to* its sue- 
cess; and incorporation will certainly help it to be 
maintained. The rule should be simple and unos- 
tentatious, and need indeed be little more than the 
^'heavenly rule" of faith, hope, and charity. This 
will involve first the realization of man's true life 
within a spiritual world-order, his utter dependence 
upon its realities and powers of communion with 
them; next his Infinite possibilities of recovery and 
advancement; last his duty of love to all other selves 
and things. This triple law would be applied with- 
out shirking to every problem of existence; and the 
corporate spirit would be encouraged by meetings, 
by associated prayer, and specially I hope by the 
practice of corporate silence. Such a group would 
never permit the Intrusion of the controversial ele- 
ment, but would be based on mutual trust; and the 
fact that all the members shared substantially the 
same view of human life, strove though in differing 
ways for the same ideals, were filled by the same 



288 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

enthusiasms, would allow the problems and ex- 
periences of the Spirit to be accepted as real, and 
discussed with frankness and simplicity. Thus 
oases of prayer and clear thinking might be created 
in our social wilderness, gradually developing such 
power and group-consciousness as we see in really 
living religious bodies. The group would probably 
make some definite piece of social work, or some 
definite question, specially its own. Seeking to 
judge the problem this presented in the Universal 
Spirit, it would work towards a solution, using for 
this purpose both heart and head. It would strive 
In regard to the special province chosen and solu- 
tion reached to make its weight felt, either locally 
or nationally, in a way the Individual could never 
hope to do; and might reasonably hope that its 
conclusions and its actions would exceed in balance 
and sanity those which any one of the members could 
have achieved alone. 

I think that these groups would develop their 
own discipline, not borrow its details from the past: 
for they would soon find that some drill was neces- 
sary to them, and that luxury, idleness, self-indul- 
gence and indifference to the common good were in 
conflict with the inner spirit of the herd. They 
would inevitably come to practise that sane asceti- 
cism, not incompatible with gaiety of heart, which 
consists in concentration on the real, and quiet 
avoidance of the attractive sham. Plainness and 
simplicity do help the spiritual life, and these are 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 289 

more easy and wholesome when practised in com- 
mon than when they are displayed by individuals 
in defiance of the social order that surrounds them. 
The differences of temperament and of spiritual 
level in the group members would prevent mo- 
notony; and Insure that variety of reaction to the 
life of the Spirit which we so much wish to preserve. 
Those whose chief gift was for action would thus 
be directly supported by those natural contem- 
platlves who might, if they remained in solitude, 
find It difficult to make their special gift serve their 
fellows as it must. Group-consciousness would 
cause the spreading and equalization of that spirit- 
ual sensitiveness which is, as a matter of fact, very 
unequally distributed amongst men. And In the 
backing up of the predominantly active workers by 
the organized prayerful will of the group, all the 
real values of intercession would be obtained: for 
this has really nothing to do with trying to persuade 
God to do specific acts, it is a particular way of ex- 
erting love, and thus of reaching and using spirit- 
ual power. 

This Incorporation, as I see It, would be made 
for the express purpose of getting driving force with 
which to act directly upon life. For spirituality, 
as we have seen all along, must not be a lovely fluid 
notion or a merely self-regarding education; but 
an education for action, for the insertion of eternal 
values Into the time-world. In conformity with the 
Incarnational philosophy which justifies it. Such 



290 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

action — such Insertion — depends on constant re- 
course to the sources of spiritual power. At pres- 
ent we tend to starve our possible centres of re- 
generation, or let them starve themselves, by our 
encouragement of the active at the expense of the 
contemplative life; and till this Is mended, we shall 
get nothing really done. Forgetting St. Teresa's 
warning, that to give our Lord a perfect service, 
Martha and Mary must combine,^ we represent the 
service of man as being itself an attention to God; 
and thus drain our best workers of their energies, 
and leave them no leisure for taking in fresh sup- 
plies. Often they are wearied and confused by the 
multiplicity in which they must struggle; and they 
are not taught and encouraged to seek the healing 
experience of unity. Hence even our noblest teach- 
ers often show painful signs of spiritual exhaus- 
tion, and tend to relapse Into the formal repetition 
of a message which was once a burning fire. 

The continued force of any regenerative move- 
ment depends above all else on continued vivid con- 
tact with the Divine order, for the problems of the 
reformer are only really understood and seen In 
true proportion In Its light. Such contact is not 
always easy: it is a form of work. After a time 
the weary and discouraged will need the support of 
discipline If they are to do It. Therefore some 
definite rule of silence and withdrawal — perhaps an 
extension of that system of periodical retreats which 

i"The Interior Castle": Seventh Habitation, Cap. IV. 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 291 

is one of the most hopeful features of contempo- 
rary religious life — is essential to any group-scheme 
for the general and social furtherance of the spirit- 
ual life. It is not to be denied for a moment, that 
countless good men and women who love the world 
in the divine and not in the self-regarding sense, 
are busy all their lives long in forwarding the pur- 
poses of the Spirit: which is acting through them, 
as truly as through the conscious prophets and re- 
generators of the race. But, to return for a mo- 
ment to psychological language, whilst the Divine 
impulsion remains for us below the threshold, it is 
not doing all that it could for us nor we all thaf we 
could do for it; for we are not completely unified. 
We can by appropriate education bring up that im- 
perative yet dim impulsion to conscious realization, 
and wittingly dedicate to its uses our heart, mind 
and will; and such realization in its most perfect 
form appears to be the psychological equivalent of 
the state which is described by spiritual writers, in 
their own special language, as ''union with God.'* 

I have been at some pains to avoid the use of 
this special language of the mystics; but now per- 
haps we may remind ourselves that, by the declara- 
tion of all who have achieved it, the mature spirit- 
ual life is such a condition of completed harmony 
— such a theopathetic state. Therefore here to- 
day, in the worst confusions of our social scramble, 
no less that in the Indian forest or the mediaeval 
cloister, man's really religious method and self-ex- 



292 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

presslon must be harmonious with a life-process of 
which this is the recognized if distant goal: and in 
all the work of restatement, this abiding objective 
must be kept in view. Such union, such full identi- 
fication with the Divine purpose, must be a social as 
well as an individual expression of full life. It can- 
not be satisfied by the mere picking out of crumbs 
of perfection from the welter, but must mean in 
the end that the real interests of society are indenti- 
cal with the interests of Creative Spirit, in so far 
as these are felt and known by man; the interests, 
that is, of a love that is energy and an energy that 
is love. Towards this identification the willed ten- 
dency of each truly awakened individual must stead- 
fastly be set; and also the corporate desire of each 
group, as expressed in its prayer and work. For 
the whole secret of life lies in directed desire. 

A wide-spreading love to all in common, says 
Ruysbroeck in a celebrated passage, is the authen- 
tic mark of a truly spiritual man.^ In this phrase 
is concealed the link between the social and personal 
aspects of the spiritual life. It means that our pas- 
sional nature with its cravings and ardours, instead 
of making self-centred whirlpools, flows out in 
streams of charity and power towards all life. And 
we observe too that the Ninth Perfection of the 
Buddhist is such a state of active charity. "In his 
loving, sympathizing, joyful and steadfast mind he 
will recognize himself in all things, and will shed 

1 "The Adornment of the Spiritual Marriage," Bk. II, Cap. 44. 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 293 

warmth and light on the world In all directions out 
of his great, deep, unbounded heart." ^ 

Let this, then, be the teleological objective on 
which the will and the desire of Individual and group 
are set: and let us ask what It Involves, and how It 
Is achieved. It Involves all the ardour, tenderness 
and idealism of the lover, spent not on one chosen 
object but on all living things. Thus It means an 
immense widening of the arc of human sympathy; 
and this It is not possible to do properly, unless we 
have found the centre of the circle first. The glar- 
ing defect of current religion — I mean the vigorous 
kind, not the kind that Is responsible for empty 
churches — is that it spends so much time In running 
round the arc, and rather takes the centre for 
granted. We see a great deal of love In generous- 
minded people, but also a good many gaps in it 
which reference to the centre might help us to find 
and to mend. Some Christian people seem to have 
a difficulty about loving reactionaries, and some 
about loving revolutionaries. And in institutional 
religion there are people of real ardour, called by 
those beautiful names Catholic and Evangelical, who 
do not seem able to see each other in the light of this 
wide-spreading love. Yet they would meet at the 
centre. And it is at the centre that the real life of 
the Spirit aims first; thence flowing out to the cir- 
cumference — even to its most harsh, dark, difficult 

1 Warren: "Buddhism in Translations," p. 28- 



294 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

and rugged limits — in unbroken streams of "gener- 
ous love. 

Such love is creative. It does not flow along the 
easy paths, spending itself on the attractive. It 
cuts new channels, goes where it is needed, and has 
as its special vocation — a vocation identical with 
that of the great artist — the "loving of the unlovely 
into lovableness." Thus does it participate accord- 
ing to its measure in the work of Divine incarnation. 
This does not mean a maudlin optimism, or any other 
kind of sentimentality; for as we delve more deeply 
into life, we always leave sentimentality behind. 
But it does mean a love which is based on a deep 
understanding of man's slow struggles and of the un- 
equal movements of life, and is expressed in both 
arduous and highly skillful actions. It means taking 
the grimy, degraded, misshapen, and trying to get 
them right; because we feel that essentially they 
can be right. And further, of course, it means get- 
ting behind them to the conditions that control their 
wrongness; and getting these right if we can. Con- 
sider what human society would be if each of its 
members — not merely occasional philanthropists, 
idealists or saints, but financiers, politicians, traders, 
employers, employed — had this quality of spread- 
ing a creative love: if the whole impulse of life in 
every man and woman were towards such a har- 
mony, first with God, and then with all other things 
and souls. There is nothing unnatural in this con- 
ception. It only means that our vital energy would 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 295 

flow in Its real channel at last. Where then would 
be our most heart-searching social problems ? The 
social order then would really be an order; tallying 
with St. Augustine's definition of a virtuous life as 
the ordering of love. 

What about the master and the worker In such 
a possibly regenerated social order? Consider 
alone the Immense release of energy for work need- 
ing to be done, If the civil wars of civilized man 
could cease and be replaced by that other mental 
fight, for the upbuilding of Jerusalem : how the Im- 
pulse of Creative Spirit, surely working in humanity, 
would find the way made clear. Would not this, at 
last, actualize the Pauline dream, of each single 
citizen as a member of the Body of Christ? It is 
because we are not thus attuned to life, and sur- 
rendered to It, that our social confusion arises; the 
conflict of Impulse within society simply mirrors the 
conflict of Impulse within each Individual mind. 

We know that some of the greatest movements 
of history, veritable transformations of the group- 
mind, can be traced back to a tiny beginning In the 
faithful spiritual experience and response of some 
one man, his contact with the centre which started 
the ripples of creative love. If, then, we could ele- 
vate such universalized individuals Into the position 
of herd-leaders, spread their secret, persuade society 
first to imitate them, and then to share their point 
of view, the real and sane, because love-Impelled 
social revolution might begin. It will begin, when 



295 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

more and ever more people find themselves unable 
to participate in, or reap advantage from, the 
things which conflict with love: when tender emo- 
tion in man is so universalized, that it controls the 
instincts of acquisitiveness and of self-assertion. 
There are already for each of us some things in 
which we cannot participate, because they conflict 
too flagrantly with some aspect of our love, either 
for truth, or for justice, or for humanity, or for 
God: and these things each individual, according to 
his own level of realization, is bound to oppose with- 
out compromise. Most of us have enough wide- 
spreading love to be — for instance — quite free from 
temptation to be cruel, at any rate directly, to chil- 
dren or to animals. I say nothing about the in- 
direct tortures which our sloth and Insensltiveness 
still permit. Were these first flickers made ardent, 
and did they control all our reactions to life — and 
there is nothing abnormal, no break In continuity 
involved in this, only a reasonable growth — then, 
new paths of social discharge would have been made 
for our chief desires and impulses; and along these 
they would tend more and more to flow freely and 
easily, establishing new social habits, unhampered 
by solicitations from our savage past. To us al 
ready, on the whole, these solicitations are less in 
sistent than they were to the men of earlier cen 
turles. We see their gradual defeat in slave eman 
cipatlon, factory acts. Increased religious tolerance 
every movement towards social justice, every in 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 297 

crease of the arc over which our obligations to 
other men obtain. They must now disguise them- 
selves as patriotic or economic necessities, If we 
are to listen to them: as, In the Freudian dream, 
our hidden unworthy wishes slip through Into con- 
sciousness In a symbolic form. But when their 
energy has been fully sublimated, the social action 
will no longer be a conflict but a harmony. Then 
we shall live the life of Spirit; and from this life 
win flow all love-Inspired reform. 

Yet we are, above all, to avoid the conclusion 
that the spiritual life, in its social expression, shall 
necessarily push us towards mere change; that 
novelty contains everything, and stability nothing, 
of the will of the Spirit for the race. Surely our 
aim shall be this: that religious sensitiveness shall 
spread, as our discovery of religion in the universe 
spreads, so that at last every man's reaction to the 
whole of experience shall be entlnctured with Real- 
ity, coloured by this dominant feeling-tone. Spirit 
would then work from within outwards, and all life 
personal and social, mental and physical, would be 
moulded by its inspiring power. And in looking 
here for our best hope of development, we remain 
safely within history; and do not strive for any 
desperate pulling down or false simplification of our 
complex existence, such as has wrecked many at- 
tempts to spiritualize society in the past. 

Consider the way by which we have come. We 
found in man an instinct for a spiritual Reality. A 



298 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

single, concrete, objective Fact, transcending yet in- 
forming his universe, compels his adoration, and is 
appercelv^ed by him in three main ways. First, as 
the* very Being, Heart and Meaning of that universe, 
the universal of all universals, next as a Presence in- 
cluding and exceeding the best that personality can 
mean to him, last as an indwelling and energizing 
Life. We saw in history the persistent emergence 
of a human type so fully aware of this Reality as 
to subdue to its interests all the activities of life; 
ever seeking to incarnate its abiding values in the 
world of time. And further, psychology suggested 
to us, even in its tentative new findings, its explora- 
tion of our strange mental deeps, reason for hold- 
ing such surrender to the purposes of the Spirit to 
represent the condition of man's fullest psychic 
health, and access to his real sources of power. We 
found in the universal existence of religious institu- 
tions further evidence of this profound human need 
of spirituality. We saw there the often sharp and 
sky-piercing intensity of the individual aptitude for 
Reality enveloped, tempered and made wholesome by 
the social influences of the cultus and the group: 
made, too, available for the community by the sym- 
bolisms that cultus had preserved. So that gradually 
the life of the Spirit emerged for us as something 
most actual, not archaic: a perennial possibility of 
newness, of regeneration, a widening of our span of 
pain and joy. A human fact, completing and most 
closely linked with those other human facts, the 



LIFE OF THE SPIRIT AND SOCIAL ORDER 299 

vocation to service, to beauty, to truth. A fact, 
then, which must control our view of personal self- 
discipline, of education, and of social effort: since 
it refers to the abiding Reality which alone gives all 
these their meaning and worth, and which man, 
consciously or unconsciously, must pursue. 

And last, if we ask as a summing up of the whole 
matter: Why man Is thus to seek the Eternal, 
through, behind and within the ever-fleeting? The 
answer is that he cannot, as a matter of fact, help 
doing it sooner or later: for his heart is never at 
rest, till it finds itself there. But he often wastes 
a great deal of time before he realizes this. And 
perhaps we may find the reason why man — each man 
— is thus pressed towards some measure of union 
with Reality, in the fact that his conscious will thus 
only becomes an agent of the veritable purposes of 
life: of that Power which, in and through mankind, 
conserves and slowly presses towards realization the 
noblest aspirations of each soul. This power and 
push we may call if we like in the language of realism 
the tendency of our space-time universe towards 
deity; or in the language of religion, the working 
of the Holy Spirit. And since, so far as we know, 
it is only in man that life becomes self-conscious, 
and ever more and more self-conscious, with the 
deepening and widening of his love and his thought; 
so it is only in man that it can dedicate the will and 
desire which are life's central qualities to the further- 
ance of this Divine creative aim. 



PRINCIPAL WORKS USED OR CITED. 

S. Alexander. Space, Time, and Deity. London, 1 920. 

Blessed Angela of Foitgno. Book of Divine Consolations 
(New Mediaeval Library). London, 1908. 

St. Thomas Aquinas. Summa Contra Gentiles (Of God 
and His Creatures), trans, by J. Rickaby. London, 
1905. 

St. Augustine. Confessions, trans, by Rev. C. Bigg. Lon- 
don, 1898. 

Venerable Augustine Baker. Holy Wisdom, or Directions 
for the Prayer of Contemplation. London, 1908. 

Charles Baudouin. Suggestion et Auto-suggestion. Paris, 
1920. 

Harold Begbie. William Booth, Founder of the Salvation 
Army. London, 1920. 

JVilliam Blake. Poetical Works, with Variorum Read- 
ings by J. Sampson. Oxford, 1905. 

Jerusalem, edited by E. R. D. Maclagan and A. E. B. 

Russell. London, 1904. 

Jacob Boehme. The Aurora, trans, by J. Sparrow. Lon- 
don, 1 914. 

Six Theosophic Points, trans, by J. R. Earlc. Lon- 
don, 1919. 

The Way to Christ. London, 191 1. 

St. Bonaventura. Opera Omnia. Paris, 1864-7 1. 
Bernard Bosanquet. What Religion Is. London 1920. 
Dam Cuthbert Butler. Benedictine Monachism. London, 

1919. 

300 



PRINCIPAL WORKS USED OR CITED 301 

St, Catherine of Siena. The Divine Dialogue, trans, by 

Algar Thorold. London, 1896. 
The Cloud of Unknowing, edited from B. M. Harl, 674, 

with an Introduction by Evelyn Underbill. London, 

1912. 
G. A, Coe. A Social Theory of Religious Education. 

New York, 1920. 
Benedetto Croce, i^sthetic, or the Science of Expression, 

trans, by D. Ainslie. London, 1909. 
Theory and History of Historiography, trans, by 

D. Ainslie. London, 1921. 

Dante Alighieri. Tutte le Opere. Rived, nel testo da Dr. 

E. Moore. Oxford, 1894. 

Abbot Delatte. The Benedictine Rule. Eng. trans. Lon- 
don, 1921. 

John Donne. Sermons t Selected Passages, with an Essay 
by L. Pearsall Smith. Oxford, 19 19. 

Meister Eckhart. Schriften und Predigten aus dem Mit- 
telhochsdeutschen. Ubersetzt und herausgegeben von 
Buttner. Leipzig, 1903. 

John Everard. Some Gospel Treasures Opened. Lon- 
don, 1653. 

George Fox, Journal, edited from the MSS. by N. Pen- 
ney. Cambridge, 191 1. 

Elizabeth Fry. Memoir with Extracts from her Journals 
and Letters, edited by two of her Daughters, 2nd. ed. 
London, 1848. 

Edmund Gardner. St. Catherine of Siena. London, 1907. 

Gabriela Cunninghame Graham. St. Teresa, her Life and 
Times. London, 1894. 

Viscount Haldane. The Reign of Relativity. London, 
1921. 

/. O, Hannay. The Spirit and Origin of Christian Mo- 
nasticism. London, 1903. 



302 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

F. 11. IlayiuanL The Lesson in Appreciation. New 
York, 191 5. 

F. H. Hayicard and A. Freeman. The Spiritual Founda- 
tions of Reconstruction. London 1919. 

Violet Hodgkin. A Book of Quarter Saints. London, 
1918. 

Harold Hoffding. The Philosophy of Religion. London, 
1906. 

Edmond Holmes. What Is and What Might Be. Lon- 
don, 191 1. 

Give me the Young. London, 1921. 

Baron Friedrich von Hiigel. The Mystical Element of 
Religion. London, 1908. 

Eternal Life: A Study of its Implications and Ap- 
plications. London, 191 2. 

Essays and Addresses on the Philosophy of Religion. 

London, 192 1. 

Jacopone da Todi. Le Laude, secondo la stampa fiorentino 
del 1490. A cura di G. Ferri. Bari, 191 5. 

William James. The Varieties of Religious Experience. 
London, 1902, 

IVilliam James. The Will to Believe and other Essays. 
London, 1897. 

Principles of Psycholog}'. London, 1901. 

St. John of the Cross. The Ascent of Mount Carmel, 
trans, hy David Lewis. London, 1906. 

The Dark Night of the Soul, trans, by David Lewis. 

London, 1908. 

Sir Henry Jones and J. H. Muirhead. The Life and 
Philosophy of Edward Caird. Glasgow, 1921. 

Rufus Jones. Studies in Mystical Religion. London, 
1909. 



PRINCIPAL WORKS USED OR CITED 303 

Spiritual Reformers in the Sixtetenth and Seventeenth 

Centuries. London, 19 14. 

Julian of Norwich. Revelations of Divine Love, edited by- 
Grace Warrack. London, 1901. 

C. G. Jung. The Psychology of the Unconscious. Lon- 
don, 1916. 

Kabir. One Hundred Poems, edited by Rabindranath Ta- 
gore and Evelyn Underbill. London, 1915. 

Thomas a Kempis. The Imitation of Christ: the Earliest 
English Translation (Everyman's Library). London, 
n. d. 

S. Kettlewell. Thomas a Kempis and the Brothers of the 
Common Life. London, 1882. 

William Law. Liberal and Mystical Writings, edited by 
W. Scott Palmer. London, 1908. 

W. P. Livingstone. Mary Slessor of Calabar. London, 
1918. 

Journal Spirituel de Lucie-Christine. Paris, 19 12. 

ff. McDougalL An Introduction to Social Psychology, 
9th ed. London, 19 1 5. 

The Group Mind. Cambridge, 1920. 

W. M. iMcGovern. An Introduction to Mahayana Bud- 
dhism. London, 1921. 

Mechthild of Magdeburg. Das Fliessende Licht der Gott- 
heit. Regensburg, 1869. 

Reynold Nicholson, Selected Poems from the Divani, 
Shamsi Tabriz. Cambridge, 1898. 

Studies in Islamic Mysticism. Cambridge, 1921. 

J. H. Overton. John Wesley. London, 1891. 
William Penn. No Cross, No Crown. London, 185 1. 
Plotinus. The Ethical Treatises, trans, from the Greek 

by Stephen Mackenna. London, 191 7. 



304 THE LIFE OF THE SPIRIT 

Plotinus. The Physical and Psychical Treatises, trans, 
from the Greek by Stephen Mackenna. London, 192 1. 

J. B. Pratt. The Religious Consciousness; a Psychological 
Study. New York, 1921. 

Richard of St. Victor. Opera Omnia. Migne, Pat. Lat., 
t. 196. 

IV. H. R. Rivers. Instinct and the Unconscious. Cam- 
bridge, 1920. 

Richard Rolle of Hampole. The Fire of Love and Mend- 
ing of Life, Englished by R. Misyn (E.E.T.S. 106). 
London, 1896. 

Bertrand Russell. The Analysis of Mind. London, 192 1. 

John Ruysbroeck. The Adornment of the Spiritual Mar- 
riage, the Book of Truth, and the Sparkling Stone, 
trans, from the Flemish by C. A. Wynschenk Dom. 
London, 19 16. 

The Book of the XII Beguines, trans, by John Francis. 

London, 1913. 

R. Semon. Die Mneme, 2nd ed. Leipzig, 1908. 

Herjbert Spencer. Education: Intellectual, Moral, and 
Physical. London, 1861. 

B. H. Streeter and A. J. Appasamy. The Sadhu: a Study 
in Mysticism and Practical Religion. London, 1921. 

B. H. Streeter (edited by). The Spirit: God and His Re- 
lation to Man. London, 19 19. 

Blessed Henry Suso. Life, by Himself, trans, by T. F. 
Knox. London, 1913. 

Devendranath Tagore. Autobiography, trans, by S. Ta- 
gore and I. Devi. London, 1914. 

A. G. Tansley. The New Psychology and its Relation to 
Life. London, 1920. 

St. Teresa. The Life of St. Teresa written by Herself, 
trans, by D. Lewis. London, 1904. 



PRINCIPAL WORKS USED OR CITED 305 

The Interior Castle, trans, by the Benedictines of 

Stanbrook, 2nd ed. London, 19 12. 
The Way of Perfection, ed. by E. R. Waller. Lon- 
don, 1902. 
Theologia Germanica, ed. by Susanna Winkworth, 4th ed. 

London, 1907. 
Sosur Therese de V Enfant- Jesus: Histoire d'une Ame. 

Paris, 191 1. 
Francis Thompson. St. Ignatius Loyola. London, 1909. 
W» F, Trotter. Instincts of the Herd in Peace and War, 

3rd ed. London, 1917. 
Miguel da Unamuno, The Tragic Sense of Life in Men 

and in Peoples, Eng. trans. London, 1921. 
Evelyn UnderhilL Jacopone da Todi, Poet and Mystic. 

London, 19 19. 
C. B, Upton. The Bases of Religious Belief. London, 

1894- 

/. Varendonck, The Psychology of Day-Dreams. Lon- 
don, 1 92 1. 

H, C. Warren. Buddhism in Translations. Cambridge, 
Mass., 1900. 

John Wesley. Journal, from original MSS. Standard edi- 
tion, vols. 1-8. London, 1909-16. 



INDEX 



Abreaction, 109 

Abri Said, 16 

Adolescence, 240 seq. 

Alexander, S. 26 

Angela of Foligno, Blessed, 

99, 130 
Apperception, 179, 284 
Aquinas, St. Thomas, 26, 58, 

200 
Asceticism, 69, 89, 288 
Augustine, St., 8, 13, 27, 

60, 198, 202, 208, 270, 

273, 295 

Autistic thought, 112, 117, 
seq. 

Auto Suggestion see Sug- 
gestion 

Baudouin, C, 144, 173 
Benedict, St. 48, 64, seq., 

68, 210 
Benedictine Order, 52, 61, 

64, seq. 
Bernard, St. 52 
Bhakti Marga, 18, 21 
Bible- reading, 212 
Blake, W., 11, 33, 46, 71, 

277 

Bolhme, Jacob, 4, 33, 55, 
70, 84, 86, 89, 118, 150, 
seq., 198, 201, 204, 244 

Bonaventura, St., 146 



Booth, General, 54, 59, 63, 

96 
Bosanquet, Bernard 6 
Brahmo Samaj, 155 
Brothers of Common Life, 

52 
Buddhism, 72, 182, 258, 292 
Butler, Dom C, 65, 169 

Caird, Edward, 246 
Catherine of Genoa, St., 55, 

67, 70, 71 
Catherine of Siena, St., 68, 

71, 87, 128^ 
Christianity, Primitive, 56, 

164 
Church, 155, seq. 

essentials of, 164, seq., 1 71 
future, 188, 281 
gifts of, 161 
limitations, 170 
Cloud of Unknowing, The, 
87, 96, 104, seq., no, 
123, I43> 145, 146, 147, 
151, 248 
Complex, 108, seq. 
Conflict, Psychic, 81, 88, lOO, 

103, 216, seq. 
Consciousness, 116, seq. 
group, 162, seq., 288, seq. 
spiritual, 219, 225 
Contemplation, 17, 121, 



307 



308 INDEX 

seq., 138, seq., 212, 219 personality of, 9, seq., 17 
in children, 260 seq. 

Conversion, 68, 75, 89, 93, Grace, 138, seq., 2o6, 211 

103, 265 Groot, Gerard, 68 

Croce, Bentdetto, 41, 43 Groups, 61, 271, 285, 8eq. 

Cultus, 171, seq. Guyon, Madame, 143 

Habit, 85, 90, 102, 172 

Dante, 9 Hadfield, J. A., 100 

Delatte, Abbot, 65 Haldane, Viscount, 28 

Dionysius, the Areopagite, 9, Hayward, F. H., 259 

rx. }i\. o Hinduism, 18, 21, 45, 51. 
Discipleship, 58, 271, seq. j^^^ jg^ 

Donne, John, 16, 46 History and spiritual life, 38, 

Eckhert, Master, 9. H2, in Td^ucation, 256, seq. 

Education, 102, seq., 177 Hoffdine, H., 24, 212 

f \^^' r Hiigel, Baron, F. von, 2, 29, 
factors of, 231, seq. ^l ' ^' 

Spencer on, 234 ^ '• I ' IV; ^ 

Spiritual, 179, 206, 228, on spmtuallife, 195. seq. 

seq.. 2^3, seq.. 251, 264 """^'^'^y' '?9, 217, 275, 282 

dangers of, 250, seq., 262 ^y"^'^^' ^8, 173, seq. 

Emotion, Religious, 18, 99, -r . j ^ c /i ^o 

145! 250, 263 Ignatius, Loyola, St.. 61, 68. 

Eternal Life, 3, 48, 195, 271 , .^\ . ^ 

Evcrard, John, 35, 40 Instinct, 76. 78, seq., 90, 

seq., 102, 263 

Fox. George, 8, 45, 59, 62, l^^^- 272 

67, 96, 109, 155, 215. »n children. 249 

270, 273 Intercession. 289 

Francis of Assisi, St., 47, 54, Introversion, 121 

59, 61, 63, 67, 270, 273 Isaiah, 12 

Friends of God, 63, 271 

Frv, Elizabeth, 55, 63, 210 Jacopone da Todi, 12. 55, 

68, 90, 93, 107, 131 

Gardner. Edmund, 87 James, William. 157 

God. Experience of, 7 seq., Jerome, St.. 54 

74. 127, 214, 238, seq., Jesus Christ, 17, 40, 47, 51. 
2S2, 275, 298 56, 59, 61, 156, 182, 



INDEX 



309 



198, 202, 268, 273, 279 Namak, 155 
Joan of Arc, St., 95 Nicholson, Reynold, ii, 16, 

"John Inglcsant", 61 18, 51, 70 

John, St., 107, 244 
John of the Cross, St., 128, Pascal, 137 

208 Patmorc, Coventry, 119 

Julian of Norwich, 20, 87, Paul, St., 13, 52, 55, 63, 
135, 144 ^8» 8I' 83, 95, 136, 210, 

244, 269 
Kabir, 5, 11, 70, 155, 19S Pcnn, William, 36, 125, 137 

Plotimus, 2, 5, II, 18, 29, 

37, 77, 201, 205 
Pratt, J. B., 20, 149, 

157 
Prayer 52, 108, 113, 120, 
seq., 199, 204, seq., 
211, 253, 265, seq. 
Childrens', 229, 243 
corporate, 169, 286 
distractions in, 126, 149 
education in, 102, 248 
of quiet, 124, 141 
Sadhu on, 209 
short act, 144 
and suggestion 138, seq. 
vocal, 144 
and vrork, 253 



Lawrence, Brother, 55 
Law, William, 27, 90, 91 
Liturgy, see Cultus 
Livingstone, W. P., 96 
Love, 90, 97, 104, 211, 244i 
seq., 292, seq. 
defined, 200, seq. 
Lucie, Christine, 14 

Mass, The, 177 
Mc Dougall, W., 163, 285 
Mc Govern, W. M., 72 
Mechthild of Magdebury, 

St., 89, 129 
Memory, 179, seq. 
Methodists, 15, 53, 286 
Mind, analysis of, 76, seq. Psyche, The, 77, seq., 103, 



foreconscious, 117, seq. 

instinctive, 89, seq., 137, Purgation, 69, 76, 90, 108, 

seq. 
primitive, 82, 99, 104, 

181, seq. 
rational, 100, seq. 
unconscious, 114, seq., 

141, seq., 230, 264 
Motive, 84, 109 
Mystical Experience, 99, 

107, 113 



116, 230 
Ration, 69 
seq., 218 

Quakers, 63, 164, 174, 238 

Ramakrishna, 149 
Recollection, 123, seq., 139, 
208, 219, seq. 
corporate, 281 
Regeneration, 15, 89, 94 



310 



INDEX 



corporate, 271, seq., 293, 
seq. 
Religious ceremonies, 173, 
seq., 188 
education, 179, seq. 
institutions, 154, seq., 281 
magic 185, seq. 
orders, bo 
Repentance, 108, seq., 218, 
269 
social, 275, seq. 
Reverie, 1 17, 122, seq. 
Richard of St. Victor, 55, 58 
RoUe, Richard, 41, seq., 67 
Rosary, 144 

Russell, Bertrand, 102, 179 

Ruysbroeck, 17, 17, 51, 54, 

seq., 106, 120, seq., 

126, 142, 199, 212, 

261, 270, 292 

Sacrifice, 185 

Sadha, Sundar, Singh, 68, 

130, 209 
Saints, 41, 257 
Salvation, 76, 89, seq. 
Salvation Army, 48, 91, 260, 

286 
Semon, R., 179 
Sin, 76, 81, 85, seq., 109, 

149, 218 
corporate, 276 
Sins, Seven Deadly, 93 
Slessor, Mary, 54, seq., 96 
Social reform, 282, seq., 296 

service, 267, seq. 
Spencer, Herbert, 234 
Spirit of Power, 13, 52, 62, 

222, 290 



Spiritual Life 

in adolescence, 247, seq. 
characters of, 22, seq., 32, 
43, 54» 58. 64, 76, 9^, 
seq., 158, seq., 192, seq., 
221, seq., 261, 269, 274, 
seq., 283, 292, 298 
contagious, 56, seq., 72, 
169, 261, 273, 285, seq., 
295 
corporate, 58, I53» seq., 
168, 250, 254. 275, 
seq., 285, seq. 
dangers of 99, seq., 263 
development of, 67, seq., 

108, 213, seq. 
and education, 228, seq. 
and history, 38, seq., 159, 

seq., 212 
and institutions 158, seq. 
personal, 191, seq., 250, 

seq., 256, 268, 274 
and prayer, 204, seq. 
and psychology, 76, seq., 

195, seq. 
and reading, 211 
social, aspect of, 266, seq. 
and work, 222, 253, 256, 
282 
Spiritual Type, 51, 192, seq., 

226 
Stigmata, 134 
Streeter, B. H., 47, 130 
Sublimation, 91, 96, seq., 

no, 201, 297 
Sufis, II, 16, 18, 51, 59, 

70, 155, 258 
Suggestion, 75, 103, 132, 
seq., 167 



and faith, 137 
laws of, 141, seq. 
in worship, 148, 173, seq. 
Surrender, 220, 299 
Symbols, 127, seq., 173, seq., 

180, seq. 
Tagore, Maharerhi Deven- 

dranath, 13, 14, 51, 67, 

213 
Tansley, C, 272 
Tauler, 257, 282 
Teresa, St, 47, 54, 61, 69, 

71, 88, 95, 123, 142, 

150, 202, 212, 290 
Theologia, Germanica, 211, 

222 
Therese de I'Enfant, Jesus, 

Venerable, 137, 148 
Thomas a Kempis, 48, 83, 

128, 139, 198, 212 
Trinity, Doctrine of, 14 



INDEX 

Trotter, W. F., 168 



311 



Unamuno, Don M. de, 10, 

Unification, 98, seq., no, 
195, 198, 221, 227, 278 

Union with God, 67, 72, 
204, 291, 299 

Upton, T., 10 

Varendonck, J., 117 
Vincent de Paul, St. 55 
Virtues, Evangelical, 94 
Visions, 129, seq. 
Vocation, 220, 225, 294, 300 

Wesley, John, 53, 55, 62, 71, 

210, 270 
Work, 222, 253, 282 
Worship, 175, 255, 260 



till? 









■■ *■ -t 



ii0m 









!!•"■■.' 






LIBRARY OF CONGRESS ^ 

029 789 407 9 



